Infectious
by Roland 'Jim' Lowery
Summary: Part 6 of the Daria: Hunter series.  An emergency call from DENA HQ pulls Daria and Jane into a trap from which even death may not give them release.  *THIRD CHAPTER IS UP!*
1. Nanobites

The following short story is based on characters created and/or copyrighted by Glenn Eichler, Susie Lewis Lynn, and MTV. All other characters were created and copyrighted by Roland Lowery.

The author gives full permission to distribute this work freely, as long as no alterations are made and the exchange of monetary units is not involved. Any questions, comments, suggestions, or complaints should be sent to **esn1g(at)yahoo(dot)com**. Thank you.

* * *

"Skin to skin, blood and bone  
You're all by yourself, but you're not alone  
You wanted in, and now you're here  
Driven by hate, consumed by fear"  
-_Bodies_ by Drowning Pool

* * *

**Infectious**  
by Roland 'Jim' Lowery

**Thursday, October 14  
2172 AD**

_Agent James Smythe straightened_ his mustache as he stared grumpily at the files spread across the inside of his glasses. He took in a deep breath, let it out, and then wiped his lenses clear with a touch to his digipad screen. With the dense walls of text and photos gone from his line of sight, Smythe could see the four people sitting across the table from him, each looking at him with a different expression on their faces.

Michael "Mack" Landon was staring at him with expectation and weariness mixed with a touch of sadness. Of the four, he had been the most cooperative, ready to give whatever information he had in his possession to help get the investigation done and out of the way as quickly as possible. Still, he - like all of them, Smythe included - was beginning to tire of the whole process.

Macks' Wife Jodie Landon had fire and steel in her eyes. If it weren't for the orange institutional clothing, Smythe felt he could almost be convinced that she was at just another business meeting with time-wasting morons, eager to get back to her real work elsewhere. When looking into that gaze, he sometimes had to remind himself that he was not a junior VP, he was not the one in trouble, and he was not about to get fired.

The other two people sat on either side of the Landons, one with a nervous, ratty face that never seemed to hold any expression save for contempt and the other with a nervous, ratty face that never seemed to hold any expression save for worry. They were the Landon's lawyers, or at least the only two of the Landons' lawyers who had been willing to try and defend them. Smythe could never remember their names, but it hardly seemed to matter. Mack told him everything and Jodie told him nothing, ignoring any and all advice the lawyers gave them.

The only reason the attorneys were even there was to ensure that the Landons' civil liberties weren't abused. The case against the two former vice presidents of Landon Enterprises was as good as shut against them. Their arraignment would be a media circus, but also a mere formality. The evidence that had come to light via carefully picking through the LE computer systems had left their guilt beyond any shadow of a doubt, and both of them had already stated that they would be pleading guilty to all of the charges.

But Smythe, the Landons, and the lawyers all had to continue the ridiculous rigmarole of question and non-answer. There were loose ends to tie up. The Department of Extra-Normal Affairs hated loose ends.

"What's the _point?_" Jodie snarled just as Smythe had opened his mouth to speak. "Ask just one of us or ask both of us together, it doesn't matter. How may different ways do you want us to say '_We don't know_'?"

"As many different ways as it takes until you remember something, Mrs. Landon," Smythe said with a heavy sigh. "The nanobots in your memory clusters have been flushed out, and it is the hope of our specialists that this will allow your brain to reform the connections they were blocking. We just have to keep jogging them until they shake loose."

Jodie snorted and crossed her arms. Mack glanced over at her, licked his lips, and then said "Go ahead and ask, agent. I don't know if it's gonna do any good, but I guess we gotta try."

Smythe smiled mirthlessly at the other man. When Mack had first gotten to the DENA holding facility, he'd sounded just as prim and proper as his wife, but over the grinding week, his speech patterns had gotten more and more relaxed. Smythe had started to suspect that the businessman that everyone had seen in vids and at board meetings had all been an act, and for the first time in years, Mack was finally allowing himself to just be himself.

If not for the circumstances under which it were happening, Smythe felt he might be happy for the man.

"So," the agent said listlessly. "Who is the 'doctor'?"

"The doctor," Mack replied, repeating the same answer he always gave, "is this person we first met two years ago. He - or she - came to us with blueprints and little working models of some really high-tech stuff, way beyond anything we were making. He agreed to make more for us and allow us to do whatever we wanted with it if we gave him funding, space, and materials, and if we would help him test his experiments in whatever way he saw fit."

"And that included-"

"Illegal stuff, yah," Mack finished, nodding his head. "We weren't going to at first, but . . . he said he would head to some other company, and then another, and another, and eventually he'd find someone who didn't care. Someone who'd give him money and look the other way, and those people would crush LE."

"Is that exactly what he said?" Smythe asked.

Mack sighed. "Yes," he said, "more or less. It's stupid, I know, but I can remember exactly what he said, every single word, but nothing else. I can't even remember what his voice sounded like!"

"Anyway, _she_ was right," Jodie interjected angrily. "Whoever had those plans would be able to destroy anyone at any time in any industry they chose. Whoever the doctor worked for would win everything. Someone was going to benefit from the doctor's work, and since she came to us first, it was our obligation to the company to be that someone."

"Hmm," Smythe said noncommittally. "Did you have contact with the doctor very often?"

"At least once a week for the entire two years," Mack confirmed. "We met with him just a few hours before the interview with Quinn Morgendorffer, in fact. Looking back on it, he seemed pretty agitated."

"The little bitch knew we were going down," Jodie growled. "She knew, and she didn't tell us. Some partner she turned out to be. I wish we _did_ know who she was, just so you could arrest her and I could get my hands around her skinny little neck!"

"_Does_ the doctor have a skinny little neck?" Smythe asked, getting the expected glare for an answer. "Are there any physical traits at all that you can remember? Any scars, tattoos, peculiar items of clothing?"

Mack shook his head ruefully. "Agent Smythe, _you_ could be the doctor for all we know!" he said, exasperated. "Hell, _I_ could be the doctor!"

The lawyer on Mack's side came to life for the first time during the interrogation. "Er, that was not an admission of guilt and should not be construed as such!" he said quickly.

Smyth put up his hand and nodded reassuringly to placate the nervous man in the expensive suit. "Not to worry," he deadpanned, "I think if any of us _were_ the doctor, this happy little meeting would be the last place on Earth we'd want to be."

The lawyer and Mack both chuckled, and even Jodie gave a derisive snort of laughter. The second lawyer simply sat and stared, leading Smythe to decide that he had left home without his sense of humor that morning.

"Moving on," the agent said. "Where did you meet with the doctor?"

"At our office, usually," Mack told him. "We-"

Mack, the humorless lawyer, and one of the agents standing behind Smythe all looked over to one side of the room suddenly with confused looks on their faces. Smythe himself felt a sudden call to reach into his jacket to pull out his pistol, but he couldn't immediately think of why.

"What just happened?" he asked the room in general.

"I . . . thought I saw the door open," the attorney sitting next to Jodie said.

Mack nodded. "Me, too," he said. "Like, out of the corner of my eye."

Smythe scratched at his neck and stood up to look around. The room was decently sized, but the only things in it besides the people themselves were the table and chairs. A quick search showed that there was no one and nothing new in the interrogation room, and that everyone who was supposed to be there was still there.

Confused and still feeling a strange sense of aimless dread, Smythe looked over at the two other agents. The one that had been helping him search the room shrugged. The other was sub-vocalizing, talking to the people standing on the other side of the two-way panel built into one of the room's walls. After a few seconds, he shook his head.

"Is this some new kind of interrogation technique?" Jodie demanded. "Have you pumped the room full of drugs or something? Because if that's the case, I'll tell you right now-"

"_Quiet_," Smythe said, the sudden authority in his voice causing her to back down in surprise. Deep down, Smythe was a pretty nice guy, or at least he thought of himself that way, and he hated having to use his agent voice. He'd resisted the temptation through the entire week no matter how surly and snarky Mrs. Landon had gotten, but the feeling of something being just slightly _off_ was growing, and he didn't have the patience to listen to her rant.

Jodie wasn't used to being silenced so quickly and efficiently, and especially not with that much force of personality, but she quickly collected herself and was about to launch into a full verbal barrage when she felt Mack's hand on her arm. She looked over to find him looking at her with fright-filled eyes, cutting through her anger for the moment.

"I think it's him," her husband said plainly.

"No," said Smythe. He continued looking around the room even though there clearly wasn't anything else to see. "There's no way he could have gotten in here. Not without us knowing about it."

"You don't know the doctor," Jodie said as she clasped Mack's hands in her own. For the first time since Smythe had met her, he heard real fear enter her voice as she said, "She can do things. And I'm starting to think there isn't anything she _can't_ do."

Smythe gripped the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. "Okay, Q&A is over," he said, then turned back to the other two agents. "Take them back to their cells and show their attorneys out."

The agents nodded and started herding the four civilians out the door. Smythe thought that he saw Mack staring back at him with something akin to pity, but shook it off as nerves. Alone in the room, he sat down and rubbed his face. Something had happened, he was sure of that. He figured the doctor might have been responsible, but he wasn't quite ready to attribute the mysterious figure with quite enough power to have done anything _serious_ that deep within a DENA building.

Thoughts suddenly filled with the possibility that some sort of gas was indeed getting pumped into the room, Smythe stood up and stalked out into the hall. A little way down from him, he saw the two agents that the Landon case belonged to. They had almost certainly just come out of the other room, having watched the entire exchange.

"Agent Smythe," the male agent said in clipped tones. "What happened in there?"

"I'm . . . not sure," Smythe said. "Everything seemed fine, and then suddenly . . . it wasn't. Whatever it was, it seemed to cause mild hallucinations and a general feeling of unease akin to paranoia. I think it's starting to wear off now."

"You had best get yourself, the Landons, and Agents Wheeling and Parks to the infirmary to be checked out just in case," the female agent told him.

Smythe scratched and nodded. "Did either of you feel anything strange in the other room?"

The two agents glanced at each other, then looked back at him. "No," they said in unison.

With a snort and a helpless shake of his head, Smythe turned and started walking down to the infirmary. If nothing else, he could get one of the nurses to take a look at his neck. It was itching like hell all of a sudden.

* * *

"Lane."

"Miss Lane," said the male voice on the other end of the comm. "This is the Department of Extra-"

"Y'know, you-" she tried to interrupt, then started again when he didn't stop. "Y'know, you don't have to say the whole damn thing every time. You could always say 'Hey, Jane, it's DENA, whassup?'"

"I'm afraid I couldn't, ma'am," he replied. "We require your assistance at the DENA building."

Jane scrunched up her face and looked in the back seat of Daria's car. "No can do, chief. We're hauling a paycheck at the moment, but we'd be happy to stop by and chat after we're done. How does an hour sound?"

"Unacceptable. Your presence is needed immediately. We are invoking the emergency clause of your contract."

"What's going on?" Daria asked from the driver's seat.

Jane put her hand over the receiver and said, "They're being dicks again. Pulling the emergency card."

"We get paid extra for that, don't we?"

Jane's eyebrows shot up as she thought it over. "Yes," she finally said as she removed her hand from the commlink. "Yes, we do. Okay, boss, we're headed that way. What are we gonna do about our package in the meanwhile?"

"We will keep him in our own lockup for the moment," the male agent said, "and then transfer him to the police department ourselves later."

"And the extra paperwork?"

"Consider it taken care of. Please hurry."

Jane snapped her comm shut and turned around in her seat. "Hear that, sunshine?" she said to the vehicle's third occupant. "You're gonna get to cool your heels in one of those upscale _federal_ pens for a while. Better enjoy the three course meals and padded toilet seats while you can!"

The woman in the back seat simply stared back, completely impassive.

"Now don't you give me that face," Jane admonished her. "You could have sat at home, smoking cigarettes and watching Captain Kangaroo, but no, you decided to indulge in your little hobby instead. I hope you learned a valuable lesson!"

"Hrn," the other woman grunted, the first sound she'd made since getting in the car. "Yeh. Request different bondsman next time."

Jane got a funny look on her face, then laughed as she turned back around. "I like her," she said. "Doesn't say much, but makes it count."

"Hrn," Daria grunted as she turned onto the nearest off-ramp headed toward DENA HQ.

The trip was short and silent for the most part, and the colony structure containing several of the local federal buildings quickly came into sight. Daria decelerated as she did a fly-by first, then slowly turned the corner at the next intersection.

"Problems?" Jane asked.

"Maybe," Daria said. "Look at the landing pads."

Jane frowned and squinted out the window. Like every other colony structure in the city, landing areas for various grav-vehicles dotted the sides, each sitting in front of the entrance to its respective building. Since the structure they were circling was government affiliated, it had a decent number of people parked outside.

The problem that Daria had spotted was that many of those people were also standing outside the doors and looking very unhappy. Every once in a while, Jane could see one of them reach out and try to slide the automatic doors by hand and less often someone trying the manual doors, but neither seemed to be allowing access.

"Is it a holiday or something?"

Daria shook her head. "Columbus Day was earlier this week, but nothing today," she said. "Not unless they declared a new one without telling anyone. Something's wrong."

"Well, I'd assume that's why our agent buddies called us about an emergency," Jane said with a shrug.

"Yes," Daria conceded, "but I think we should take this slowly."

"I think we should still take it sometime today," Jane grumbled. "Can we at least land so I can stretch my legs?"

Daria glared at the building outside her window for a moment, then nodded. "Fine," she said as she sped the car up, taking it all the way back around to the DENA landing pad.

The first thing the women noticed as they got out of the vehicle was the absence of people standing outside the doors. Unlike the rest of the structure, the only cars parked out front seemed to be the sleek black sedans belonging to the organization's agents. Jane helped their passenger out of the back seat, then peered around curiously.

"Wow," she said. "Where are all the nutjobs?"

Daria didn't answer as she, too, scanned the area. On the few occasions they had stopped by the DENA building, its front lot and much of its main lobby had been taken up with every imaginable form of delusional mental case that inhabited Lawndale City. The agents, Daria and Jane had come to understand, tried to deal with as many of them as they could, but the flood of crank cases and people who truly believed they had seen things they really hadn't seen continued unabated every single day.

Daria was heartened by the fact that DENA at least seemed to hold a healthy amount of skepticism concerning the masses that assaulted their doors daily. Once, one of the agents had even told her, "Just because they give an excruciatingly detailed report, have dozens of pictures and vids as evidence, and can even supply working parts taken directly from a spaceship, that doesn't mean they actually _saw_ a spaceship."

But the UFO chasers were gone for the day, it seemed. Daria, Jane, and their latest ward were all alone on the pad, and the only noises they could hear were those of traffic and the muted sounds of angry shouting drifting over from other lots.

"Let's go," Daria said, starting toward the doors.

Jane grabbed their prisoner's arm and pulled her forward gently. "And if the doors are closed here, too?"

"Then we open them."

The trio stopped short as the doors opened for them. Darkness lay just beyond, ameliorated only by the midday light streaming through the thick glass of the doors and windows.

"Trap," Jane said, her features clouding up.

"Trap," Daria agreed as she pulled her pistol from its holster.

"We're still going in?" Jane asked.

"We're still going in," Daria confirmed. She then turned to the third woman and said, "What we're about to do is very, very dangerous. We've got experience dealing with these things, but we can't promise you any protection once we've crossed these doors, even if we leave you out here in the car. In fact, it may be even _more_ dangerous to wait out here. So we're going to leave it up to you . . . in or out?"

Jennifer "Burnout" Burns mulled the situation over for a few moments, her thoughts visible in the one green eye that wasn't covered by her pale blonde hair, but nowhere else on her face. She looked back at the virtually empty parking lot, in at the dark building, then made a one-shoulder shrug.

"In," she said in her raspy, high-pitched voice. "No telling if I'd ever be found if you didn't come back out. Cuffs?"

"Stay _on_," Jane said sternly. She pulled out one of her own pistols and checked its charge. "Just in case all that's wrong is a local power problem. Don't worry, when the scary crap starts happening, we'll set you loose. Unless it's more convenient to feed you to whatever's chasing us."

"Cops?" Burnout asked.

Jane snorted and shook her head. Daria said, "If what we think is going on is really going on, then the police who don't just mess up and get killed will probably try to actively stop us. We're not exactly on the best terms with most of the LCPD at the moment."

Burnout frowned slightly but didn't say anything else. Daria and Jane finished checking their equipment, then steeled themselves.

"Here we go," Jane breathed as they stepped into the building and the darkness within.

As soon as they were inside, heavy shutters slammed down across the doors, causing the lobby to descend into pure black. Burnout spun around in surprise, blinking rapidly in a futile attempt to pierce the veil. Two soft clicks sounded behind her, causing her to spin around again to glare at the bounty hunters. Small beams of light projected from the lapels of their coats, and they looked back at her with eyebrows arched.

"What?" Jane said. "You weren't expecting that?"

"No," Burnout said tersely, then held out her hands. "Cuffs?"

Jane rolled her eyes. "That wasn't scary," she said. "We'll let you know when something _scary_ happens."

Proceeding deeper into the room, Daria and Jane held their pistols out, which caused the lights on their lapels to turn off and the flashes attached to their weapons to turn on almost seamlessly. The DENA lobby jumped and weaved with shadows as the wide, bright beams rapidly swept back and forth, but the hunters expertly ignored the illusions and watched carefully for any real movement among them.

Burnout followed close behind them, her eyebrows scrunching almost close enough to touch as she looked at the overturned furniture that dotted the room. Several plants had once sat in a neat row along the entranceway, but they now sat on the floor, trails of dirt leading back to the pots that had once housed them. She couldn't be sure without a closer look, but it seemed as if the slender trunks of the small trees had some kind of damage running along the bark, roughly circular chunks that had been removed by force.

Jane was the first to reach the security desk sitting in the back near the elevator bank. After pointing her pistol's light over at the other side and making sure nothing was going to jump out at her, she reached over, picked up the deskcomm, and held it to her ear.

"Dead," she said, placing it back on its cradle. "So are the screens."

"The shutters weren't closed manually, so there's power in the building somewhere," Daria reasoned.

"That somewhere isn't here," Jane said with certainty as she methodically pressed the power studs under each security screen. They all remained unlit. "But either way, I guess that puts us on the stairs if we want to go to any of the other floors. Whoever's got control of the shutters probably has control of the elevators, if they even work."

As if speaking about it made it happen, one of the nearby lifts dinged softly. Daria and Jane swung their weapons around at the sound while Burnout shifted away from it. The screen next to the elevator's doors had come alive, and a small graphic showed the lift's relative position in the shaft as it moved down through the building. The bounty hunters switched off their lights and turned on their nightvision to take advantage of the dim light cast by the screen.

"Hey," Burnout said as she was once again nearly blinded by the darkness. Then, "_Hey_," more insistently when she was ignored.

Daria shushed her quietly but forcefully and then whispered for her to get down behind the desk. Jane, meanwhile, moved to the left to get a clearer shot, then they both waited until the doors slid open with a soft _woosh_.

At first it didn't seem as if anything was going to happen. Jane was just about to start circling around further so she could actually see inside the elevator car when a hand popped out and grabbed the edge of the wall. With an infuriating slowness, the person inside the lift seemed to be almost having to physically pull themselves forward, the shuffling of their feet against the carpet just barely audible.

The man that gradually stepped out into the lobby did not look remotely happy. His long face was drawn down in a deep look of misery, and his eyes stared into the darkness with a dull sheen that could be seen even through the low-light filters.

The most important thing to Daria and Jane, however, was that he was wearing the black three-piece suit particular to DENA agents, which included a lapel comm and a badge identifying him as Agent Matherson. Giving twin sighs of relief, the women flipped back to their lights and started to lower their weapons.

"Hey, Agent Matherson? _Shit!_" Jane cursed as she and Daria immediately pulled their pistols back into position.

As soon as the beams had hit Matherson, his head snapped toward them and he bared his teeth, causing blood to slop over his lips and drool down his chin. The dullness that had been over his eyes was revealed to be the beginning of milky cataracts, and the side of his pale, greyish face that had been hidden from the bounty hunters before had massive gashes running down it. The look of misery had been replaced by one of unreasoning hatred as he advanced on them.

"Agent!" Daria yelled as he stalked slowly toward her. "_Agent!_ If you do not stop I will be forced to put you down! _Agent Matherson!_"

Ignoring her completely, the man continued bearing down. With no other choice than to let him do whatever he was going to do - which wasn't much of a choice at all - she fired three stun rounds into his chest, right over his heart. His shoulder jerked back and his arm spasmed for a second, but he didn't stop or even make a sound.

The closer he got, the more Matherson seemed to be determined to do her bodily harm. Diplomacy had failed, so more stringent negotiation tactics were called for. Gritting her teeth, Daria switched the setting to kill and drilled coherent light into the same triple pattern as before.

The agent stopped that time, his forward momentum halted by the concussive element of the shots. He registered no shock, no horror, nor any other reaction he should have had from getting shot three times in the chest. At most, a mild mixture of annoyance and desire could be seen passing through the anger on his face before he started lurching forward again.

"My turn," Jane said with a snarl as she dialed up the output on her own pistol.

The sound made by most laser pistols was similar to a small firecracker with an underlying sizzle and whine. Jane's, however, blew like an M80 taking out a heavy metal spring. The thick bolt of compressed energy flew through the air and pierced Matherson's brain pan, leaving behind a wide, bloodless hole.

The agent dropped to the ground, his limbs flailing helplessly as his body seemed to try and right itself. The movements slowed as the women watched, then finally stopped, leaving him in a very undignified position. Lifeless eyes stared at the ceiling as blood slowly pooled out of his ears.

Daria and Jane moved in carefully, keeping their weapons aimed at the prone figure the entire time. Jane reached out and tapped one of his arms with her boot but got no reaction. As Daria crouched down to examine the body, Jane grinned and lifted her gun up to her face.

"Who loves her new guns?" she said in a babying voice. "I do! Yes, that's right, mommy loves yo-_sonofawhore!_"

Daria snapped her head up to see Jane rubbing her cheek with one hand, the other holding her pistol as far from her body as possible. "You okay?"

"Yah," said Jane. "But I think mommy's gonna have to buy her babies some better heat sinks. How's the patient?"

"Definitely dead," Daria said as she looked back down. "So's his commlink." She put the barrel of her pistol against the side of the dead man's head and turned it to the side. "Look here, though. It looks like his jugular was torn out. The whole right side of his suit is covered in blood, probably from the wound."

She looked back up and squinted at Jane. "I think," she said, "he should have _already_ been dead."

"Zombie."

The bounty hunters looked over at Burnout, who had emerged from her hiding spot. She stared down at the body with steely eyes.

"I don't think we should be jumping to any conclusions," Daria told her with a frown, "but . . . maybe. We need more information."

As Daria and Jane turned to head for the stairs, they were stopped by Burnout's insistent voice yet again. The blonde held out her wrists and growled a single word.

"_Cuffs_."

With a long suffering sigh and an exaggerated gait, Jane clomped over and deftly removed the restraints. Burnout rubbed her wrists, then held out one of her hands expectantly.

"You've got to be kidding," Jane said flatly. She looked back at Daria, who tilted her head to the side thoughtfully before throwing a hand up in the air. "Okay," Jane said, turning back. "But if you make either of us regret this, it will become our new mission in life to make _you_ regret it. Capiche?"

Burnout nodded solemnly. With a deep breath and a this-is-not-a-good-idea expression, Jane pulled a large plastic bag from one of her longcoat's inside pockets and unzipped the top. With deliberate care, she reached into the container and transferred several items from it to Burnout, who quickly sorted everything into her own voluminous denim jacket.

The last of Burnout's personal belongings to be given out was an ancient-looking black lighter. She flipped it open, flicked the wheel, and gave a half-smile at the dancing golden flame before shutting it and slipping it into her pocket.

"I should keep that one," Jane said, pointing her finger in the other woman's face. "Just keep your gun out and that antique holstered."

The blonde casually checked the charge in her slimline hold-out pistol, deliberately ignoring the bounty hunter. With one last disapproving look, Jane walked back over to Daria.

"Gosh, it's Little Miss Hardass," the shorter woman deadpanned. "Can I have your autograph?"

"It's bad enough we're going to have to deal with undead monstrosities," Jane groused. "We shouldn't have to do it while simultaneously being _on fire_. So, we were going to the stairs, weren't we? Where to?"

Daria waited until Burnout had finished situating her gear and joined them before saying, "Up. Our personal agents have their offices on the fifth floor, and I figure it's as good a place as any to start looking for people. Living people, anyway."

The door to the emergency stairwell was manual and unlocked, allowing easy access even with the spotty power. The stairs themselves twisted up and up as far as Daria's light could reach, but went down only as far as the building's basement. Jane shined her light down onto a closed access hatch that would allow entry into the utility level between the DENA headquarters and the building below it.

"Wonder if it's open," the raven-haired woman mused.

"I'm sure we'll have a good chance to check when we're running for our lives later," Daria said, then started up the stairs.

The march up the steps went uneventfully, but the trio still remained on their guard as Jane pushed the door to the fifth floor open and slipped out into the hallway. Daria and Jane stood nearly back to back as they traced their lights back and forth in opposite directions down the corridor.

"Clear," Jane pronounced.

"Got something this way."

Jane turned to look down the hall, following Daria's light as she slowly moved it across the wall, where a jagged line marred the blue-grey paint. The line was dark red, smeared for the most part, and disappeared in a few places to show back up a little further along.

The three women approached the oddity slowly. Most of what they could see was at about waist height to them, but there was one point a few meters ahead where it briefly spiked up onto a slightly discolored part of the wall. Laying on the floor underneath this spike was a flatscreen, broken and leaking gel onto the carpet.

Burnout leaned past Daria and sniffed slightly at the discoloration on the wall. "Blood," she said.

"I'd say it might belong to our friend Agent Matherson," said Daria, "but it looks like it's heading away from the elevators instead of toward. We should probably follow it, in case whoever left it is still alive."

"If a zombie got 'em," Burnout said as they continued down the corridor, "they won't be alive long. They'll turn into a zombie."

Daria stopped and lowered her pistol, her shoulders squaring up as she slowly turned around to glare at the criminal.

"Oh, Burn baby, why'd you have to go and say that?" Jane asked pleadingly. "Now we have to listen to-"

"_First_ off," Daria snarled, "we still don't know _what_ they are exactly, or even if there _is_ a 'they'. It could be that the guy down in the lobby was the only one and there's something else going on here.

"_Second_," she continued, getting more and more vehement as she talked, "what you are trying to describe is a _ghoul_, an undead creature that eats the flesh of the living and creates other ghouls by transmitting their condition to those that they wound. A _zombie_ is a creature that is risen from the dead through some outside means and act only on the orders of a controlling force, usually their creator.

"And I don't _care_ what all those stupid vids say," she said quickly as she cut a hand through the air before Burnout could interrupt, "because they are _wrong_. I don't care that people have been calling them zombie vids for almost two centuries, because no number of centuries of insipid _pop culture_ can erase the _real culture_ behind the concepts that they so ineptly mishandle.

"_Got it?_"

Burnout blinked at Daria a few times, then shrugged and said, "Okay."

"See?" Jane said, crossing her arms. "Every single time, she has t-"

A dark shape suddenly pushed the door behind Jane to the side and launched itself at her back. With a shout of surprise, she spun around and started grappling with it, dropping her pistol in the process. Daria and Burnout jumped out of the way as the figure carried the bounty hunter all the way to the opposite wall and pinned her down.

"_Holy shit!_" Jane screamed as she tried to push her attacker away. "_Get this fucking zombie off me!_"

The thing that used to be a woman pressed in on its intended victim. Jane grabbed its arms at the wrists, but it leaned in, mouth slavering, and bit down on Jane's collarbone. Jane growled through her teeth, then yelled, "Shoot it! Shoot it! _Somebody shoot it!_"

Burnout was the first to recover from the suddenness of the attack. She stepped in, put the barrel of her pistol against the attacking woman's ribs, and fired off several shots. The bolts burned in one side of the creature's torso and out the other, but the only reaction it gave was to release Jane's collarbone so it could bare its teeth at Burnout.

"In the _head!_" Jane shouted at her. "In the _head!_"

By that time, Daria had moved in as well. She and Burnout put their guns on either side of the monster's head and tore an X through its brain. Jane pushed the lifeless corpse down to the ground, shuddered violently, and started wiping herself off.

"What the hell?" she said, her eyes still wide behind her sunglasses. "What happened to slow and steady? I liked slow and steady! This one came at me like a freight train!"

While Burnout kept her weapon trained on the body just in case, Daria moved over to Jane and started checking her over. The other woman waved her off impatiently.

"I'm fine," she said. "She bit right through another perfectly good coat trying to get to my chewy center, but she couldn't get through my hard candy shell. See?" Jane pulled the shredded shoulder of her long coat back to show that the body armor underneath was still intact. A disgusting string of drool oozed down from a large wet spot where the thing had clamped down. "I'm gonna have bruises to show for it, though . . . she wasn't just fast, she was strong as a mule! What the hell is going on here?"

"Don't know," Daria said unhappily. "Let's see."

The corpse was that of a middle-aged woman wearing a blue dress and a single shoe from a pair of flats. An ID badge hanging over her left breast held the picture of a smiling, healthy version of the rapidly paling face several decimeters above it and identified her as Barbara Tallman, a DENA file clerk and systems manager.

"So, how does a desk jockey go from rocking a deck to trying to chew my head off?" Jane asked.

Daria held up the woman's left arm to reveal a half-circle of small puncture wounds running across her forearm, close to the wrist. "Besides the laser holes, this is the only wound I can find. Bite marks," she told Burnout, who was looking at them with a confused look. "From their size and the fact that she herself was all bitey, I'd guess that they're human bite marks. They broke the skin, but it doesn't look like it bled too much. Maybe she was faster because she still had most of her blood."

Burnout frowned and said, "Undead don't need blood," then thought about it. "Except vampires."

"I don't think they're dead _or_ undead," Daria proclaimed. "I don't know if they're exactly alive, either, but they're being kept in a state of animation by something even when they _should_ be dead. The track record so far says nanobots, which would need the bloodstream to be in good condition so they can continue to circulate throughout the body and keep it running."

"She was breathing," said Jane. "She didn't make any sound - which was creepy as hell, by the way - but I could feel her breath on my neck."

"Their muscles would eventually seize up without oxygen. Dead or alive, the nanos would want to keep the lungs pumping to keep the body moving." Daria reached down and pushed open one of the dead woman's eyelids. "I'm not sure what the cataracts are all about. Nor am I certain why shooting them in the head shuts them down. I'd think the nanos could manipulate the nerve endings directly, but . . . I don't know. High school biology I can figure, but sophisticated nanoengineering is a little beyond me."

"So they're _not_ undead?" Burnout asked.

Daria sighed in frustration. "I still don't know what they really are exactly," she said, "but it seems they're supposed to _resemble_ undead. A while back I said something about us having to fight werewolves the next time. I didn't think the universe was crazy enough to take the suggestion of pitting us against vid monsters _seriously_, but here we are."

The blonde tilted her head to the side. "Second time you've mentioned something about doing this before," she said. "Who are you?"

"Daria Morgendorffer and Jane Lane, fugitive recovery agents for Slow Loan Bail Bonds," Daria said, "just like we told you when we picked you up. We just also happen to be embroiled in a steamy plot of intrigue, action, suspense, and science-fiction monstrosities."

"That's messed up," Burnout said, frowning slightly.

"Tell us about it," Jane huffed.

Burnout shook her head. "No," she said, "I mean how you dragged me into this."

"Seems to me you were told you could go wait out in the car," Jane reminded her. "We woulda cracked the window for ya. And in a couple hours, a nice big hunky firefighter might've gotten you out, and you woulda had a great story to tell your kids about how you met daddy."

Burnout's scowl went deeper. "Right."

"Am I going to have to sit you two in opposite corners?" Daria asked sternly as she stood up and looked back and forth between them. "We have a blood trail to follow. Let's get back to it, but let's go at it a little smarter. We don't need any more surprises coming up on us."

Reaching into the pouches hanging from her belt, Daria pulled out a pair of her spare glasses and a thin strip of plastic, then tossed them to the criminal element of their trio. Burnout tuned the glasses to the digipad in her jacket pocket, then pressed the bit of plastic to the side of her pistol. She pressed the strip's internal stud, causing a beam of light to project from one end and giving her an instant flashlight like those built into the bounty hunters' weapons.

With that, they proceeded down the hallway in formation, each woman moving to the next doorway along and checking it before motioning the next forward. They stepped around the broken display screen as they passed it, leaving bootprints in the gel that had smeared across the carpet from its broken facing.

Door after door remained clear as they followed the red stain on the wall. Several of them, in fact, wouldn't open at all, leading them to speculate that the doors had either been fitted with manual locks or otherwise tampered with to remain sealed even without power. Those that the trio could get into and check were in various states of disarray. Some were completely fine, looking as if the occupant had merely stepped out for the day, but most had at least one chair turned over or a few items knocked off a desk and onto the floor.

"I think we have to start considering the possibility that the person we're trailing is pretty damn dead," Jane said through her teeth several minutes later. "No way a normal person could have lost this much blood and kept on going."

Daria grunted her agreement. "We might as well keep following it," she said. "Our agents' office is coming up soon, and it seems to be headed that direction anyway."

"Well, that's not ominous at all," Jane returned sarcastically.

"Hey," Burnout called back to them, motioning them to the door she was pointing her pistol through.

The bounty hunters moved up and looked in around her shoulders to see what looked like the aftermath of a tornado. What had originally been a series of straight, organized cubicles had become a scattered mess of broken plasboard, metal, and cushioned walls, all torn apart and strewn about in a haphazard fashion amongst busted desks, dented shelves, and trashed computer decks. As bad as some of the other rooms had been, Daria and Jane still found themselves impressed at the sheer amount of carnage that had been wrought there.

"Some of this here looks like it used to be a barricade," Daria said, pointing at the debris right by the door. "I think we're looking at former safe spot that the creatures broke through."

"I see some blood here and there, but no bodies," Jane said as she craned her neck around. "Even if these things are contagious, you'd think the kind of concentrated attack needed to make this much of a mess would've left a few bodies that the nanos couldn't latch on to."

"Maybe they did all get infected. Or maybe the survivors managed to drag the bodies away."

"Maybe the zombies dragged 'em off," Burnout added. "To eat."

"Okay," Daria said, trying to keep a hold on her temper. "_Why?_"

Burnout shrugged. "It's what they do. If these things are supposed to resemble undead, then they're probably programmed to eat people whether they need to or not."

The bounty hunters blinked in surprise. "Well," Jane said, "that sounds strangely reasonable. Not to mention absolutely disgusting. So, should we go in and check it out or keep moving on?"

Daria mulled it over then said, "Move on. The office we're looking is just around the next corner."

The corner in question was part of a T-intersection in the hallways. The trail continued until the edge of the wall on their right, then reappeared on the wall they were walking toward as a large splotch before continuing off to the left. Though Burnout didn't know exactly where they were going, she could sense Daria and Jane's unease as they passed by her, making it easy to guess which direction they would be taking.

Daria put her back against the left wall, exhaled sharply, and quickly twirled around to point her pistol down the new hallway. Jane came up right behind her, covering the other direction, then they both declared it clear. Burnout moved up and, conscious that danger might still pop out of anywhere, double-checked it for herself.

"Not clear," she pointed out, shining her light on the pile of furniture clogging up the right-hand corridor all the way to the ceiling.

"Not monster infested, either," Jane said testily.

The blood trail ended at a doorway a few meters away. The sign sitting next to it listed a room number, but the spot where names could be seen on similar signs further down was blank. The door itself was mostly closed, showing only a sliver opening.

"Call out, you think?" Jane whispered.

"We get shot or munched if we don't, we might only get munched if we do," Daria whispered back, then raised her voice. "Agents, this is Daria Morgendorffer, fugitive recovery license 334-A! I have two others with me, so please do not shoot! And if whatever is in there isn't an agent anymore," she added sternly, "prepare to have your brain blasted straight out of your skull!"

She reached out and slid the door open as quickly as its mechanisms would allow, then all three women pointed their guns in through the empty frame. Their lights illuminated five figures standing in the middle of a room with walls that glistened and a ceiling that dripped with red, looking as if someone had set off a bomb filled with blood. The figures themselves were covered in the substance, and they looked up as one to bare their teeth and glare at the trio with eyes clouded by a milky film.

The smell coming from the room was like that of a slaughterhouse. Burnout, who had moved to stand in between Daria and Jane, retched and gagged as she backed away from the door, shooting randomly. The bounty hunters dodged to either side to avoid her blindfire while the creatures inside ran into it heedlessly.

The former human that led the pack absorbed the brunt of Burnout's attack, most of the shots passing through his chest and barely slowing him down. As soon as he reached the door, Jane slipped one booted foot out and caught him across his legs, causing him to tumble to the ground. The creatures following him trampled over his prone body - and almost over Jane's leg as she hastily yanked it back - in their mad dash toward Burnout, who Daria tackled from the side to drive her out of the way.

The last of the creatures tripped over his fallen comrade, but the other three plowed into the wall opposite the door like actors in a slapstick comedy. Jane leaned over the topmost of the two creatures and fired twice into its skull, then retreated as the bottom one knocked her hands back and dislodged himself from the fresh corpse with preternatural speed.

The other three were already picking themselves up as well. Daria fired into the head of one of them while she flicked open her left armblade, but the shot went slightly wide, burning through just over and to the side of one of the creature's eyes. It wasn't enough to fell the rabid woman, but she seemed dazed from the blow as the remaining two rushed toward Daria.

Daria fired again, but once more her shot went wide, that time missing completely. The creatures closed in too quickly for a third shot, so she dropped her gun completely and made the move to unsheathe her right blade while slashing with the left. One of the creatures caught the edge across the face and spun off to the side, leaving Daria open to strike at the other. Her right fist came up and she realized too late that there wasn't a blade sitting over it.

None of her bones cracked as her knuckles slammed into the unyielding skull of the woman running at her, but from the pain that tore up through her forearm, they might as well have. The creature came to a full stop with the blow, but unhesitatingly reached up and gripped Daria's arm with both hands, smearing gore all over her sleeve.

The monster's teeth felt like jagged razor blades as they started cutting through the flesh on Daria's fingers. She could feel each and every tooth as it sliced in and scraped against the bone underneath. She could feel wet liquid flow down her fist and wondered while she screamed in torturous pain if that liquid was her own blood or drool oozing out of the undead woman's mouth.

Before she could collect her thoughts enough to reach up with her other hand to try and free herself, the teeth were gone. The pain remained, but at least it wasn't escalating. She curled up around her wound and tried to stop screaming in pain, even though she knew it would just be replaced by screams of terror.

She had broken bones, broken cartilage, dislocated joints, been burnt, stabbed, shot, and had even had a lung punctured once, but nothing she had ever been through seemed to compare to the pain washing across her hand like wildfire.

Hands patted around her waist, but she didn't care. If it was one of the zombies or ghouls or whatever, she just hoped that they would go ahead and chew off her whole damn hand. Dimly she was aware that one of her pouches was being opened, then there was a pressure on the side of her neck and suddenly everything went black.


	2. The Survivors

"Jesus shit," Jane swore as she looked at Daria's hand. She carefully dabbed more antiseptic on the wounds and wondered if it would actually do anything. Either way, she continued to dab, wiping up blood as it seeped out.

_If we just had a bone knitter and a dermal regenerator, we could have this fixed up in a few minutes,_ Jane thought. _And if I had a fairy godmother, I'd be the prettiest princess at the ball._

With the wound cleaned as best as she could manage with just the emergency first aid supplies she and Daria carried, Jane wrapped the fingers together with some basic bioplastic tape, set Daria's hand down gently, and then went to sit next to Burnout.

Neither of them said anything nor even looked at each other. Jane had only sat next to the other woman for mutual defense, though she'd nearly been ready to drop the blonde off with the next set of creatures they ran across after Burnout had demanded they either leave Daria behind, shoot her in the head, or both. Burnout was convinced that Daria would soon enough turn into one of the creatures too thanks to the bite.

Jane had angrily argued that they had no idea how the whatever-it-was spread, or even if it was contagious at all. There was even the possibility, Jane had yelled, that the stuff was in the air that they had been breathing since they'd gotten in, and they might all three be turning into monsters within the hour anyway, no matter what.

Just before things had downgraded to actual physical violence, Burnout had dropped it and then helped Jane drag Daria to a nearby room and set her up on a cleared office desk. Jane could still tell that the other woman wanted to put a bolt between Daria's eyes, but as long as she didn't say anything, Jane wasn't going to say anything. They would just wait until Daria woke up and find out what-

"Gah _dammit!_"

Daria's bandaged hand shot up, and she seemed to be staring blearily at it when Jane and Burnout jumped up and dashed to her side.

"What the hell happened?" Daria asked as she tried to sit up.

"What's the last thing you remember?" Jane asked. She picked out a small water pouch and held the straw up to her partner's lips.

Daria drank greedily for just a few seconds, coughed, then said, "Remember? The last thing I remember is getting my hand bitten off by that ghoulish bitch!" She put her unwounded hand against her head, then spoke in a softer tone. "It's not something you forget anytime soon."

Jane licked her lips. "Okay, after that, Burnout shot the one that bit you," she said. "I took out the two at the door, then handled the one you swiped with your claw. The one you grazed kinda flopped around for a bit and then stopped moving. I slapped a tranq on you when you didn't respond, then we brought you in here and cleaned you up."

"Dammit," Daria said with a sigh. "I am really getting sick of getting knocked out on these little adventures."

"At least you haven't turned into one of those things," Burnout said, crossing her arms. "Yet."

"Dammit, Burn-"

Daria put her hand on Jane's shoulder and shook her head. "She's right. If these things are supposed to be acting like movie ghouls, then I may end up turning because of this." She swallowed hard, then continued, "As unappealing as that may be. Transferring the nanos through fluids - like through saliva into the bloodstream - seems like a pretty likely method of infection."

"I'm glad we can discuss this in such clinical terms," Jane said sarcastically, "but doesn't that mean you're _dead?_"

Fixing Jane's eyes with her own, Daria pushed herself off the desk. "Not yet, it doesn't," she said. "And if we can find someone quickly enough, we might be able to get this crap flushed out of my system before it takes hold."

"Okay, fine, but first, what about your undersleeve special?" Jane asked. "If we come up against any more zombie-ghoul-things, we're gonna need all our gear to be reliable, right?"

Daria sighed, shook her head, and pulled her right sleeve down to look at the sheathe strapped to her forearm. "The damn thing has been sticking ever since I pushed it through the faceplate of that Vexxer," she said. "I've been meaning to readjust it, but it'll have to wait. I'll just have to remember to cut from the left only."

She tried to curl the fingers on her right hand, but only moved them about a centimeter before grimacing in pain and giving up. "Guess I'll be shooting from the left, too," she added grimly.

"So what now?" Burnout asked.

Daria rolled her sleeve back down, put her Stetson on, and awkwardly pulled her pistol out with her left hand. "Now we go back to the agents' office and see if we can find some clue as to where they ran off to."

"Nothing but blood," Burnout said as they stepped back out into the hallway.

"Maybe, maybe not," said Daria. "We won't know unless we look, and it's better than wandering around aimlessly. Don't worry . . . tracking people down is our business. We'll find them."

The bodies were where the women had left them, tumbled all over each other in front of the office door. Daria kicked at one with her foot, but it took the minor attack with the usual indifference of any normal corpse. After looking down at the pile of flesh for a few moments, she turned to the door.

"Stay here," she said. "If I'm already infected, it doesn't matter if the blood has nanos in it or not."

"Suits me," Jane said, wrinkling her nose at the smell of the other room. "There's something I've been wanting to check out here anyway."

The air inside of the office was oppressive, weighing down on Daria as she stepped around the desks carefully. The stench was almost overwhelming, even after she lifted her shirt over her mouth and nose and anchored it with her glasses. The floor was carpeted, but it had apparently absorbed all of the red liquid it could, leaving a quarter inch layer of gore squelching around her boots.

The only visible light came from Jane and Burnout's torches outside the door, which was enough to allow Daria to look around with her nightvision instead of her own gunlight. If there was anything still animate in the room, she didn't want to startle it before she could prepare herself for its reaction.

But nothing jumped unexpectedly from any of the corners, and the areas underneath the desks were empty. Even the machines in the room were silent. The only thing that she found besides more blood was a pile of body parts in the back, squeezed between two filing cabinets.

They were the remains of humans, she was sure, though they only barely resembled their original shapes. Flesh and meat had been torn forcibly from bone by tooth and claw in random patches and - if her surroundings were any indication - with violent abandon. Who they might have belonged to was impossible to determine. Whatever clothing the people had been wearing was either gone or buried under the pile, as were their heads. Daria thought she saw just a hint of hair poking out from underneath what might have been an arm, but her gag reflex was already working itself into a high fever and there wasn't enough money in the world that would make her want to reach out and touch that cesspool.

She wobbled her way out of office, pushed past the other two women, and dry heaved as she leaned against a wall. Her vision swam as her thoughts tumbled around each other like drunken gymnasts.

"You okay?" Burnout asked.

"Of course she's not okay. Just give her a minute," Jane said, unconcerned, as she continued with her work over the corpses.

"But-"

"She was just in a room full of human puree, chica," Jane said more sternly. "Leave her alone and help me here."

After a few minutes, Daria's retching stopped. She spit a few times, wiped her mouth on her sleeve, then walked back over and said, "I didn't see anything that would help us," she said, "but I think we can definitely call these things 'ghouls' now. They only bit me a little, but those poor bastards . . . it must've been like a feeding frenzy.

"So what are we doing over here?" she asked, leaning over the two bodies Jane was inspecting.

"Well, I got to thinking about the bite mark on the ghoul who pushed me up against the wall," Jane told her, "and I wanted to see if these guys had anything similar."

"And they don't," Daria said with a frown. Looking over the woman and man's stripped corpses, the only wounds she could see were the laser holes they had burned through the ghouls in the earlier fight.

"Bingo," Jane said, grunting as she turned the woman over to show her flawless back. "I don't even see a puncture wound for a needle or anything. Maybe they changed because of something they ate? Or something in the air?"

"Maybe," Daria returned, rubbing her chin thoughtfully. "But that doesn't mean their bite isn't still-"

She was cut off by the whining sizzle of rapid laser fire.

The trio snapped their heads up in the direction of the sound. "Survivors?" Daria breathed.

"Dunno," Jane replied quietly, hefting her pistols. "Let's find out."

The shots continued as they creeped their way down the hall to the nearest intersection. Jane and Daria snapped off their lights and instructed Burnout to keep hers on, but trained at the floor. She followed a short way behind them so their bodies would block most of the light as they turned their nightvision on and peered around the corners into the intersecting hallway.

Jane motioned them over to the left side and pointed down the litter-strewn corridor. Laser blasts, glaringly bright in the green and black of their low-light, erupted from another intersection a short way down. Two ghouls were laying perforated on the floor while another shook briefly before falling to join them.

The shooting ceased, then a figure slowly emerged from around the corner and started checking the corpses over. There was a momentary movement from the floor, then another burst of laser bolts tore one of the ghoul's head to pieces and put it down for good. Satisfied with its work, the figure stood up and moved away from the bodies, heading straight for where the women were standing.

At first, Daria thought it might just be a trick of the nightvision, but as the thing approached, she could clearly see that it was a robotic drone of some type, but not like any she had ever seen before. Even the heavily modified Vexxers the Landons had been building had been normal in comparison.

It had the appearance of a humanoid insect, a rail thin construct comprised almost entirely of angles, points, and sharp edges. Its extremities appeared to have been removed from other 'bots and hastily welded onto the body, with small mounds of scarred metal on the limbs serving as testament to exactly that being the case. Its triangular head moved rapidly back and forth, scanning the hallway as it moved almost silently on small caterpillar tracks that served as its feet. The hands seemed to have a few too many joints and a few too few fingers, and strapped across both forearms were miniature Gatling lasers. One of the multi-barreled guns spun softly in preparation of use while the other sat in standby mode, cooling down from the earlier battle.

Jane flicked her light back on and stepped out into the open. Daria suppressed a yelp of pain as the light flared momentarily in her nightvision and blindly tried to pull her partner back to cover. Jane shrugged her off, put her hands up, and yelled, "Survivors!"

Daria's sight returned just as the machine stopped a few meters away and raised its arm to aim its spinning laser array at Jane. She prepared to make another grab for the other woman's longcoat when she noticed that the drone was hesitating.

"We're survivors!" Jane repeated. "We're not monsters! There's two others here with me! Guys, get your asses out here already or it's gonna think I'm lying," she hissed at them.

"What's happening?" Burnout asked as she and Daria slowly moved out into the corridor.

"I think it's automated," Jane replied. "I figured the dog brain was probably set to hunt down ghouls and rescue anybody still living. Right now it's trying to decide whether or not we're really-"

The drone lowered its weapon, scooted forward like it was moving on inline skates, and stopped right in front of them. The head briefly looked them over, then split in two on a vertical seam. A gelscreen unrolled between the two halves and lit up, showing a widely beaming face covered with various piercings.

"'Allo, luvs!" the face greeted them. "It's about time you two came slogging along!"

"Axl, you old so-and-so!" Jane laughed as she put her arms down. "Good to see _some_body made it. What the hell is going on here?"

"Oh, long story, Janey," the hacker said, suddenly serious. "But I'm getting told that I need to bring you lot down to command central, so I guess I've got time to tell it, 'ey?"

Axl turned the drone around and motioned for the three women to follow him. Burnout gave the machine an distrusting look, but fell into step with the bounty hunters before they could leave her behind.

"I don't know much about the beasties themselves, mind," Axl was saying as they moved through the building. "That'll have to wait until you're up 'ere with everybody else. But the stuff that's been trippin' about the computer systems? Bloody brilliant! If, you know, somewhat inconvenient.

"Earlier today, you see, somebody started mucking about in the surveillance nodes, erasing the proper bits and puttin' in false ones. Then, once the beasties started going around bitin' blokes and birds leff an' right, well, the 'ole thing just went tits up! Lights, communications, everyfink. The entire building went on shut-down-"

"The whole _structure_," Daria interjected. "We saw people standing around outside the other federal buildings before we came in."

Axl fell silent for a few moment, then said, "Bloody 'ell, that puts a new spin on fings. The agents supposed it was just a concentrated attack on them, and if they could get through to the FBI or CIA stations on either side of us, we could get some 'elp. Anyhow, it makes sense with as much muscle as is getting put into controlling the computers. Whoever it is, they can turn any system on an' off at will, seems like, and every move they make is calculated to make fings 'arder on us than they've gotta be. Its taken me and three ovver fellahs just to keep our little bunker safe and running this whole time."

"At least there are other people still hanging in there," Jane said. "Nice new bod, by the way. I didn't figure the agents would be letting you touch any of their toys."

"Technically, I'm not supposed to be. Criminal an' all. But desperate measures and whatnot, luv." The 'bot gave a little shrug. "Besides, I 'elped them design the little bugger, so I figure that gives me the right to a test drive or two."

"You only got the one?"

"Nah, there's five in all . . . well, four now. I've got them set on auto, patrolling the building an' hunting down beasties while I've been working on getting the computers back. This one 'eard some shooting, so it started 'eading down this way. When it saw it was you birds, it raised a ruckus and 'ere I am!"

Jane chuckled. "Well thank goodness for that," she said. "We had no idea where we were going before you showed up."

"How many ghouls are there in the building?" Daria asked.

"Don't rightly know, luv," Axl told her. "About as many as there were people in the building, I reckon. We've found a coupla survivors 'ere and there, though, and there's a few sections we haven't had any communication wif at all yet. So we're being all 'opeful for the time being."

Daria frowned as she looked around. "If there are so many, where are they now? We got attacked three times in pretty quick succession, and you gunned down another group near where we were, but we've been talking all this time and not making any effort to move slowly or quietly. Shouldn't we be crawling with the bastards?"

"Three times?" he asked, sounding confused. "'Ow many in all?"

Burnout spoke up for the first time in conversation. "One in the lobby, one in an ambush on this floor, and then five in one of the offices."

"Oh, sorry, luv, I don't fink we've been introduced! Name's Axl. I'd shake 'ands, but these fingers ain't rightly built for it."

"Burnout," the blonde said in reply.

"Anyhow, to answer your question, Daria . . . nah. We should be fine until we get to base camp. Most all the beasties ran off to hide after they infected most everybody else. They tried a seige on us for a bit, but we knocked 'em back. Since then, they've stuck mostly to sneak attacks, mostly leaving us alone as long as we leave them alone."

"I don't trust that," said Daria.

"Ain't one of us does, luv," Axl assured her. "Ready for a climb?"

They stopped just outside a door leading to one of the emergency stairwells. Axl opened it and rolled in first, guns at the ready. When he determined it was clear, the other three followed him in. A few soft clicks echoed as the tracked wheels attached to the 'bot's legs locked so they wouldn't spin. The suspension in between them continued to flex, however, as Axl started walking up the stairs, moving almost but not quite like a human foot.

They proceeded mostly in silence, the only sound being that of Burnout and Daria's breathing after they'd climbed nearly ten flights.

"Are they _both_ machines?" Burnout asked as they started on their eleventh set of stairs.

"Sometimes I wonder," Daria groused.

Jane caught their whispered conversation and laughed. "Hey, amiga, I keep inviting you to the gym," she said, "and you keep counter-inviting me to the Pizza Palace instead."

Daria grumbled, "I didn't _used_ to get this winded."

"You _used_ to walk with me to school every day," Jane countered brightly.

"No worries," Axl called down to them, "we're almost there. Just a coupla floors to go!"

The new level looked more or less like the one they'd left. There were minor signs of battle here and there in the form of broken glass, torn floors, walls smeared in blood and riddled with laser holes, and various other bits of debris and destruction. It got worse as they moved along, and soon they began coming across the corpses of those who had obviously become ghouls at some point.

Daria stopped to look around at the former humans. "There's bodies here," she said. "Except for the chewed pile in the office, we haven't seen any bodies around that we didn't make ourselves."

"The beasties are surprisingly tidy," said Axl. "They drag off the ones we kill elsewhere, but they can't get close enough 'ere."

"Why's tha-" Jane said, then stopped in surprise. "Oh."

The barrels of two automated weapons platforms moved to aim directly at the women, whining harshly as they powered up. Axl's 'bot jerked for a second, then the whining slowed to a stop as the platforms hunkered back down on their spidery legs.

"Sorry about that," the hacker said, once again in control of the 'bot. "The ARMs are a little twitchy sometimes. Hadda put them to sleep until we get past. Come on, then!"

The entryway opened automatically when Axl approached it, letting the four of them in. The three humans turned their flashlights off, pleasantly surprised to find that Axl and his three computer compatriots had managed to bring what appeared to be full power to their little corner of the building, which included all of the overhead lights.

The room was a large and mostly white forensics lab that looked like it had been picked up, turned over, shaken around, and then set back down again. Various tools, weapons, and other pieces of equipment were scattered across every available surface, including a fair bit of the floor, as if the area had become infested with human packrats.

Daria made a quick count of about twenty people in the immediate area, many of them lower functionaries that neither she nor Jane recognized. Several of them were milling about on various tasks, while the rest were huddled in any convenient chair or corner they could find, their faces drawn and pale. An undercurrent of weariness brought on by barely suppressed panic seemed to permeate the room. Only a few people took any notice of the new arrivals, and when they did their attention quickly turned back to their tasks or their own misery.

The far half of the room, which Axl was leading the group toward, had once been a cleanroom sealed off by heavy panels of safety glass, but the airlock had been smashed open at some point, ruining the filtered atmosphere. Through the thick windows, Daria could see a small knot of black-suited agents huddled in conversation. A strangely lanky yet pudgy figure stood a short ways off from them, looking bored until he noticed the bounty hunters.

"Daria! Jane!" Artie shouted as he ran awkwardly through the busted airlock. He would have surely bowled both women over in a massive hug if Jane hadn't reached out and grabbed him by the shoulders first.

"Hey, Artster, you made it!" the dark-haired woman greeted him. "And your new hat finally came in, I see."

"Yah, it's great!" Artie gushed as he straightened the _StarVerse_ cap containing a series of DENA developed and approved telepathy dampening materials that he had been promised shortly after joining them. "And it's great that you're here!" he continued. "I told them you were coming. I told them you were here. They wouldn't listen, no, they never listen to Artie, but here you are!"

"Yes, here we are," Daria echoed unenthusiastically. "Not that it isn't great to see you again, Artie, but we really need to talk to the agents."

Artie bobbled his head up and down, causing the loose sections of his flaming red hair to fly crazily about. "Oh, yes, definitely, definitely," he said, then suddenly became concerned. "Just . . . be careful. It's going to be tricky."

"Tricky? Tricky how?"

"I don't know," he admitted, shuffling his feet. "It just is. But come on!"

Artie led the bounty hunters into the cleanroom with Axl and Burnout in tow. The group of agents, six in number, looked up as they entered. The male and female agents that Daria and Jane had dealt with primarily stepped to the forefront and nodded their heads slightly in greeting.

"Miss Morgendorffer, Miss Lane," the male agent began before looking down at Daria's hand and cutting the rest of his sentence short.

"_She's been bitten!_" the female agent barked as she and the other agents pulled their weapons and aimed them at Daria.

Jane immediately pulled her own pistols out in response, pointing one each at the male and female agents. Daria cursed as her injured hand didn't allow her to react in time to arm herself, and Burnout held her pistol pointed up, looking as if she wasn't entirely certain which side she wanted to be on.

"_Wonderful_," Daria said sourly.

"Miss Lane, please lower your weapons and step away from Miss Morgendorffer," the male agent said levelly. "You don't fully understand what's going on here."

"No, I _do_ fully understand what's going on here," Jane shot back. "I understand that for all _you_ know, she just burned her hand with some coffee before we ever even got here, Agent Jumptoconclusions!"

"_Did_ she burn her hand with some coffee?" the female agent asked.

Jane fell silent as the muscles in her jaw started twitching. Daria sighed, rolled her eyes, and said, "No. I got bitten by one of the ghouls."

"Then you could turn any second now. Miss Lane-"

"Hey!" Jane shouted, shaking one of her pistols for emphasis. "Nobody is shooting anybody until and only if they actually turn! Got it?"

"'Ere now, 'old up!" Axl suddenly interjected. "There's gotter be some kind of mistake 'ere! I've been wiv Daria all the way up from the fifth floor, and she's been just fine!"

"It's true! It's true!" Artie whined pleadingly.

The female agent shook her head. "That's impossible."

Axl's digitized voice rose in anger. "What does that mean, 'impossible'?" he yelled as the rotating lasers on the 'bot's arms started to spin. "You lot deal with the bloody impossible every blinkin' day! Now, I guarantee you that if she _did_ get bit by one of those things, it must have been at least half an hour ago, if not longer!"

"How long does it take to change?" Daria asked.

The male agent hesitated before answering, "The longest we've observed for the initial effects to become apparent is five minutes. This is . . . unusual."

With exaggerated slowness, he holstered his pistol, then motioned for everyone else to do the same. Jane waited until all of the agents had put theirs away before following suit, and even then her hands twitched as she steeled herself to draw them again.

"Go find the doctor and bring him here," the female agent ordered one of the other suits. When she saw the looks the bounty hunters were giving her, she quickly said, "I apologize, that was a poor turn of phrase. He is _a_ doctor, not _the_ doctor, of course. He's one of our top forensic specialists."

"Who is this?" the male agent suddenly asked, pointing at Burnout.

"She's Jennifer 'Burnout' Burns, the perp we told you we were hauling in when you called us earlier about the emergency," Jane said, "but by the looks on your faces, I'm going to guess that you didn't call us earlier and you have no idea what I'm talking about." She swore under her breath.

"Duped again," Daria concluded. "We've really got to stop listening to everything we hear on the comm. Maybe we should start using smoke signals to communicate instead."

"Phoney comm call aside," the female agent said, "Axl told us about the rest of the structure being locked down as well. Surely you knew it was trap then, yes?"

"Well, duh," Jane said. "We're not _entirely_ incompetent."

The male agent scowled. "Yet you allowed yourselves and this relatively innocent and unrelated woman-"

"Thank you," Burnout said, earning her a nasty glance from Jane.

"-to be taken in by it. You realize, of course, that this is exactly what the doctor expected you to do?"

"Yes," said Daria.

"And yet you entered this facility anyway?"

"Yup!" said Jane. "What were we supposed to do, let you guys get eaten? Well . . . that might not be so bad, actually, but we still had to come save Axl and the Artmeister!"

"Might I remind you," the female agent said, "that one of those two put you in the path of a mercenary bent on your capture and the other actively tried to capture you himself?"

Artie nervously glanced from side to side and tried to shrink down into his shirt, but Axl pushed his way between Daria and Burnout to point one of the 'bot's long fingers in the agent's face. He stretched the machine up to its full height, nearly half a meter over the agents' heads.

"Now see 'ere!" he growled. "I've been cooperating good and proper wiv you lot, an' if it weren't for me, you wouldn't have nicked Mr. and Mrs. Landon anywhere as readi-"

"Oh, hello!" a bright, nasal voice called out from the airlock. "I'm sorry, am I interrupting something? I can certainly come back later if-"

"Not at all," the male agent said, motioning the newcomer over. "Miss Morgendorffer, Miss Lane, Miss Burns, allow me to introduce Dr. Theodore DeWitt-Clinton."

"Greetings and salutations!" the thin man said as he moved in to shake hands with the three women. He smiled earnestly at each of them in turn. "I believe that, due to the informal nature of the situation, it would be acceptable if you just called me 'Ted'."

"So . . . what do you do here, Ted?" Daria asked when he had finished.

"Oh, a little bit of everything covered by the forensic sciences," he said with a shrug, "but my specialties are biology and nanotechnology." He reached into a pocket on his lab coat and pulled out a packaged pair of sterilized gloves, tore the plastic seal, and put them on. "Speaking of which, I heard that one of you has gotten a nasty little bite from our ambulatory deceased!"

Daria held up her bandaged hand. "Yo."

"Did you just say 'yo'?" Jane asked quietly.

"Shut up," Daria shot back as Ted started unwrapping her fingers.

"Oh, my. My my my my . . . " Ted said, shaking his head ruefully as he gently probed the wound with a gloved finger, causing Daria to wince slightly in pain. Though the edges of the loose flaps of skin had mostly congealed with thick, sticky blood, some of the red liquid still pooled out across the bit of visible white bone and dripped to the floor.

After a few moments of silence, one of the agents huffed impatiently. "Is she infected or not?"

"Hmm?" Ted looked up and blinked rapidly. "Oh! I have absolutely no idea. It's a very good question, though, thank you!" he said without a single trace of irony, then turned back to his patient. "Now, Miss . . . ?"

"Morgendorffer," Daria said automatically, then shook her head. "_Daria_."

"Well then, Miss Daria, how long has it been since you received this bite?"

"Forty-five minutes," Jane answered for her. "Give or take five. She was sedated for part of it."

"Hmm," Ted hummed again, more thoughtfully this time. "That might have slowed the spread of the nanomachines in the bloodstream slightly, but we should still be seeing secondary effects around the wound itself at the very least at this point. Mild pallor, engorged veins, minor necrosis, that sort of thing. But this appears to a typical, if somewhat extreme, instance of human bite.

"I tell you what," he said, letting go of Daria's hand and snapping his gloves off. "Let's go over to my workstation, get a blood sample, and then start working on cleaning up this nasty mess, shall we? I'm afraid we're not fully equipped for personalized dermal regeneration, but we can get the process started with some soap, water, and a few general-use patches."

"Okay," Daria said quietly, holding her damaged hand gingerly as she looked everywhere but directly at Ted. "Sounds good."

After they left for the far end of the cleanroom, Jane turned to the agents, hands on her hips, and asked, "Okay, now what?"

"Hungry," said Burnout.

"We have a fully stocked drink machine," the female agent told them, "but I'm afraid all we have to eat are snack food and a few bag lunches we were able to salvage from the nearby breakroom."

"Hell, now that you mention it, I'm starving myself," Jane said, rubbing her belly. "I'll take whatever you've got. I'm not picky."

"I got it!" Artie yelled happily as he ran out ahead of them through the airlock. "I got it!"

Burnout looked oddly over at Jane, who just shrugged.

"He likes fixing food for people," she told the blonde woman. "What can I say?"

* * *

Daria flexed her fingers a bit, but sucked air through her teeth and quickly straightened them again. Cleaning the wound at the cleansing station hadn't hurt very much, but despite that and even with a fresh painkiller patch, she still couldn't manage a fist. She decided to concentrate instead on Dr. DeWitt-Clinton as he prepared himself and his instruments for a more thorough examination of the potentially infected area.

Ted was thin without being wiry, looking as if skinny was simply his natural state of being. His medium blonde hair was carefully combed back, and his dark eyes were framed by small lenses. Under his white lab coat, he wore a light blue button-down shirt and navy blue slacks, the perfect picture of formal casual.

Noticing that her mind was starting to drift but that she was still staring at the man, Daria collected herself and looked a few workstations down the line as he started the arduous task of patching her up properly. Seated not too far away was Axl, the flesh and bone Axl, plugged into the computer sitting in front of him.

When she and Jane had first come across the real Alex Morrison and not just the holographic projection that had represented his consciousness, Daria had felt both nauseous and outraged at what the doctor had done to the poor man. His skull was twice as large as it had originally been, and the sides bristled with several network jacks. His neck was reinforced with bars permanently screwed into his new skull and his collarbone, keeping it from breaking under the increased weight, but also keeping him from being able to turn his head from side to side.

He was wheelchair bound, since the enhancements made to his brain to enable him to take mental control of multiple drones at once had also rerouted several of his motor systems. He had lost the use of his legs in order to better manipulate the limbs of the machines he jumped into.

Daria had learned later from the DENA agents that his upper body had also started to atrophy from disuse since he spent so much time in the virtual world. They had set him on a regimen to improve that particular situation, but from what Daria could see, he either wasn't keeping up with it or it simply wasn't helping. Underneath his massive cranium, it looked like he was starting to waste away completely.

But despite her sympathetic feelings, Daria also realized that Axl's situation was one that he had brought upon himself. A desire to be the absolute best in his field had driven him to make a deal with the doctor, though to his credit, he was currently using his abilities to fight back against that devil.

Daria turned her attention back to more immediate matters to find that Ted was already halfway through sewing her skin back together. A patch filled with what she assumed to be local anesthetic sat on the inside of her arm right next to her wrist, keeping her from feeling anything from the elbow down.

"So," Ted said softly, not looking up from his work, "how much exactly do you know about medical nanotechnology?"

She tried to shrug without moving her hand. "Not much more than what you learn in high school or while getting treated, I guess," she said. "They put nanobots in your system, and they catalyze various chemical reactions to speed up and guide the healing process."

"Essentially correct," he told her, nodding. "What most people usually don't learn is exactly how it goes about doing that. For the most part, nanomachines on their own are pretty unsophisticated . . . relatively speaking. A few molecule chains put together in specific sequences, programmed in much the same way your own body cells or a virus are programmed, depending on the exact type.

"Singular nanomachines are just fine and dandy for most jobs," he continued. "Bolstering the immune system, for example. Each individual nano can act and react just like one of your natural anti-bodies, though of course with the right programming, they can be set to attack only specific types of bacteria or viruses instead of working as a broad-based agent. The non-tailored machines that we'll be putting on your hand once I'm finished with this are similarly basic in structure, working merely to help along the clotting process and regrowth of skin cells.

"_Tailored_ dermal regeneration nanomachines, however, are a completely different kettle of fish. They're the kind that actually work with your DNA to put everything right back where your body's own blueprints say its supposed to be, disallowing the possibility of scars or other irregularities. As such, they need to be much more sophisticated than their cousin nanos. How do you think this is accomplished?"

Daria shook her head helplessly. In the back of her mind, she felt she could come up with a few reasonable guesses, but for some reason she felt she wanted to actually hear him explain it. He took a moment to finish the last little bit of necessary sewing and started carefully applying bioplastic bandages before answering his own question.

"Instead of several nanomachines that are all built toward the same general purpose," he said, "they instead use several _different_ nanomachines that are but smaller parts of a much larger machine. Instead of being the ends, they are instead a means. Once they are placed within the host body, they are attracted to each other, combining in the specific order set into their programming in order to set up a new construct that follows a newly assembled meta-program.

"Some of these nanomachine chains can be quite large, in a manner of speaking, and perform a wider quantity and more sophisticated quality of jobs than the individual variety. Aaaaaand, done! What do you think?"

Daria looked down at her hand and found that she was genuinely impressed. The bandages had been applied cleanly and professionally in a very short time.

"Thanks," she said, lifting the anesthetic patch off and tossing it in the small recycler under the workstation. "And . . . thanks for the lesson and all, but . . . why? I mean, we'd figured that the ghouls were being created by nanos, but how does all that relate exactly?"

Ted held a finger up and turned to the workstation's computer. "I have a hypothesis," he said as he started pulling up and swiftly closing down various tasks on the screen. "If that hypothesis is borne out, then it may all be _very_ relevant to your situation. And voila!"

The screen filled with an image that Daria recognized as being magnified, but she couldn't place what it was of.

"This, Miss Daria Morgendorffer," Ted explained, "is the blood sample I took from you earlier." He pointed at a string of information that was scrolling along one side of the image. "You see this? This is an account of all the nanomachine activity that is currently happening in your bloodstream and, through some inference, the rest of your body. Though that last is only speculative, you understand."

"I understand that," Daria said. "What I don't understand is exactly what activity it's saying is happening."

"Nanomachines," he said, "are virtually ubiquitous in modern society. Your average human being has anywhere up to thousands of nanos floating around in their body at any given time, most of them dormant. Most are leftover remnants from medical treatment, but some few are from other, more random outside sources. Construction nanos - perfectly harmless and inactive, I assure you - may get in through the pores or other openings whenever you come in contact with nano-built clothing, walls, furniture, or what-have-you. Sometimes nanos can be traded from person to person through bodily fluid transfer. It's why blood transfusions are even more tightly screened and filtered than they were before the mid-21st century, but it can also happen in minor amounts through activities such as kissing or sexual congress."

Ted looked over at her and rubbed his chin. "As I understand it, this isn't the first time you've dealt with the creations of the individual known as 'the doctor'. There were the suits that used nanofibers to burrow into and manipulate the wearers, the man with fast healing, and the young man who could change his form, correct?"

Daria nodded slowly and began to pale as it began to dawn on her where he was going with his line of thought. "But I didn't trade blood or spit with any of them," she said stiffly, "and I sure as hell didn't have sexual congress."

"Perhaps not, but it seems a safe assumption that you still came into physical contact with them in some way. The glove you're still wearing, I noticed, is fingerless. If you punched them or grabbed them at any point and your flesh touched theirs, there is a slight chance that some of their nanomachines transferred from them to you, if not through their blood then possibly from their sweat."

"The pieces of Sherman that I cut off during our fight turned into this sort of grey goop," she fumed. "And some of it . . . _may_ have touched bare skin at some point."

"Well, however it happened," Ted said as he pointed at the screen again, "this confirms my suspicions and says that you most definitely have bits of the doctor's nanomachines floating around in your body."

"That . . . is almost unbearably disgusting," said Daria. She felt the pit of her stomach drop down into her feet at the news. "Is it . . . I mean, am I going to be alright?"

"Oh, definitely!" Ted reassured her. "They're all dormant, showing no active movement and not reacting with your own body chemistry in any way that the machines can determine. These nanos were tailored for specific individuals, and they don't seem to be keen on working for anybody else. They are, in fact, what saved your life!"

She brightened and snapped her fingers. "It's acting like a vaccine," she said in sudden understanding. "The ghoul nanos are detecting the presence of the other nanos, so they stay inactive, thinking that I'm already infected!"

"The truth is a bit more complicated, but that's essentially correct, yes! I told you before that the more sophisticated nanomachines will string together in order to create a more sophisticated program. Well, the doctor's nanos are capable of creating chains of _incredible_ complexity, far and away more sophisticated than anything even the top corporations of the world are capable of creating, as far as I'm aware. And though the coding is also much tighter, it still creates relatively massive chains within the body, big enough I'd dare say to be seen by the naked eye in some cases. Because of the similarity in both coding and function of the ghoul nanos, as you call them, and the fast healing nanos, they are identifying as being one and the same. As a space-saving measure, the newly introduced nanomachines simply go dormant and wait to be flushed out of the system naturally."

"So I'm not going to turn into one of those things?" Daria asked.

Ted scrunched his face up and wobbled from side to side for a moment. "Welllll," he said hesitantly, "for now, anyway. We'll need to do a full flush of your system at some point, but until then you're still a carrier. If enough of the older nanomachines break down fully or are otherwise removed from your system, then the ghoul nanos will activate and start the conversion."

"How long do I have?"

"It's hard to say since I still haven't completed my study of the doctor's newest creation," Ted told her, "but from these readings, I'd say you'll be okay for at least a day or two, as long as you don't get infected any further and nothing horrible happens to your immune system."

Massive coils of tension that Daria hadn't been fully aware she'd been carrying suddenly popped and fell away. She slumped down in her chair and bowed her head to keep Ted from seeing the moisture that had started collecting on her bottom eyelids. She slid her good hand across her eyes as surreptitiously as she could, then looked back up at him with a grateful expression.

"A day or two should be more than we need to get out of here," she said, her voice as solid as a rock. "Thanks."

"You are quite welcome," he said, bowing slightly in his seat. He began to gather up his first aid supplies, then hesitated and turned back to Daria. He stared directly into her eyes and gave her a soft smile. "You know, it _is_ okay to be a little scared. You don't have to hide it."

She was about to reply with a flippant remark when the sincerity apparent on his face caused the retort to catch in her throat. She quickly reeled herself back in and glanced to the side. "Uh, sure," she mumbled. "I'll keep that in mind. Thanks again."

With an awkward abruptness, she jumped up from her chair and stalked out, pulling the brim of her hat down low as she passed Axl's inert body and thankful that the hacker couldn't see the sudden blush spreading across her cheeks.

* * *

"Hey, Daria," Jane said as she tossed a foodpack at her partner. "Saved you some."

Daria caught the pack expertly as she approached the makeshift table and sat down. Without looking up at the other woman, she busied herself with activating the pack's self-heat mechanism. Small slits appeared in the cover, letting out tiny tufts of steam as the food within each individual section was re-heated to its optimum temperature. Working carefully with her injured hand, Daria opened the pack fully, separated the plastic cutlery from the tray, and began to eat.

Jane watched the entire process with silent bemusement. After her partner had gotten a few bites in, she leaned across the desk and said, "So . . . what on your mind?"

Daria swallowed and began to mix up the mashed potatoes with her fork. "Nothing," she said, then cleared her throat. "What do you think of DeWitt-Clinton?"

"What, that forensics guy?" Jane asked, trading her amusement for confusion. "I dunno. He was kind of weird. A little too eager. Like he stepped right out of the 21st century. Why, you sweet on him or something?"

Silence fell over the table. The only sounds were those of nearby DENA employees enjoying their own lunches while Daria chewed slowly and avoided eye contact. Jane stared at her for a few moments before sitting back in surprise.

"Holy shit, you _are_ sweet on him!" she said, a little louder than she'd intended. After the few glances from other tables had subsided, she leaned back in and hissed, "Might I remind you that you're already seeing someone? Just in case you don't remember his name, either, it's _'my rotten, stinking brother'!_ What the hell, Morgendorffer?"

Daria dropped her fork and glared back at Jane. "Trent and I have an understanding," she said. "We're trying to take things slow, not make the same mistakes we did last time, and part of that is that we can see other people if we want."

"And he's okay with this?" Jane asked incredulously before shaking her head. "Of _course_ he's okay with this, the dipstick. So . . . has he . . . ?"

"He went on a date with Monique last weekend."

"That-! Urgh!" Jane's fingers curled into claws as she mimed choking someone. "And _you're_ okay with this?"

Daria looked her straight in the eye. "Yes," she said evenly.

Jane tapped her fingers rhythmically and fumed for a few seconds. "Fine," she groused. "But if you two don't work out and he ends up with that skanky bitch again because of it, I'm taking my frustrations out of you personally!"

"Fair enough," Daria said with a nod.

"Okay, so, why Dr. Demento?"

Daria shrugged. "I'm not entirely sure. I guess because he's obviously intelligent, but not arrogant about it. I wouldn't say he's 'eager', just . . . motivated. He's not vid-star handsome, but he's not exactly ugly, either. And it seems like he's comfortable being who he is."

Jane rolled her head to one side, stuck out her tongue, and made retching noises until Daria swatted at her to make her stop.

"You know, if you started scratching yourself and grew a little more back hair, you'd have your 'typical male' impersonation down pat," Daria told her derisively. "Now, if we're done with snooping into my love life, potential or otherwise . . . where did Burnout run off to?"

"She and Axl grabbed a couple of the tech boys and found a cozy corner to conspire in," Jane said. "She was talking about some idea she had, but I was too busy ignoring her at the time. And . . . oh! One second." She turned in her seat and started snapping her fingers. "Hey! Agent . . . uh . . . "

Seven people in dark suits turned to look quizzically at her. She huffed and pointed at the male and female agents they usually dealt with. "_You two!_ Get over here! She's back!"

The two agents excused themselves from the small group that they had been talking to and made their way over to the table, where Jane stopped them before they could speak.

"No no no," the bounty hunter said. "Before anything else, I wanna hear some names."

The agents frowned. "No names," the male agent said.

"It's better that-"

"_Bzzt!_" Jane cut them off. "Wrong answer! Look, I enjoy the whole cloak and dagger bit as much as anybody. But trying to refer to you two in any specific way without names is getting more than a little annoying, especially when we're surrounded by your extended three-piece family, okay? Before you give Daria the third degree, you're going to cough up some damn _names_, whether they're real or not. Got it?"

The agents looked at each other, then back at Jane.

"Agent Bealer," the woman said.

"Agent Moore," the man followed.

Jane stared at them for a moment and shook her head. "Okay, whatever. Have at her."

"Can I at least finish eating first?" Daria asked, shoveling another bite of unidentifiable goop into her mouth.

"Actually, we had asked Miss Lane to notify us the second you came back," Bealer told her.

"Something about how they didn't want to waste food one someone who was gonna start munching brains within the hour anyway," Jane said with an expansive shrug and rolling eyes.

"Dr. DeWitt-Clinton gave me a clean bill of health," Daria said, waving the agents away grumpily. "As long as I don't get bitten again and we can either get control or get out of this place within a couple of days, the junk already in my system will sit right where it is until we can get it flushed out. _Now_ may I eat?"

"In a moment," Moore assured her. "We think we may have located another batch of survivors down in the detention center and were planning an expedition to ascertain their situation. Now that the two of you have arrived, we would like to put you in charge of that expedition."

"Because we're the most qualified?" Jane asked skeptically.

"Or because we're the most expendable?" Daria added.

Bealer raised an eyebrow fractionally. "The two do not necessarily need to be mutually exclusive," she said. "But consider, if any of the survivors are prisoners, it would work somewhat in your favor. It is our understanding that your reputation has spread down there, especially after the capture of the Landons. It would seem likely that any free prisoners would be more likely to follow your lead willingly out of fear than to follow a group of agents."

"No, see, you're going about it all wrong," Jane scoffed. "If you're trying to bribe us into going, then forget the flattery. Just skip to the part about the cold, hard cash."

"You will be considered to have been on active duty for DENA from the second you entered the building," Moore stated in an official manner. "And considering the specific circumstances, any time spent outside the safety of this hub garners you hazard pay as per your contracts."

"I'm in!"

"So am I," Daria conceded, "as long as you two go away and let me _finish eating_."

The agents nodded curtly, then left them to their devices. As Jane started adding up all the extra pay they were going to be racking in and deciding how she was going to be spending it, Daria quickly polished off her meal, tossed the tray and utensils in the nearest recycler, and stood up. Jane stood as well and led her to the work area that Burnout had taken over.

Axl had apparently sent the patrol drone back out into the building, inhabiting instead a basic, off-the-shelf techbot to help the blonde. His face glowed softly on the 'bot's small screen. Two DENA employees stood nearby, watching her work with mixed expressions and generally looking as if they had been shooed off but were unwilling to leave.

Burnout herself was hunched over the workstation, which she had cleared of its computer, the screen and flexboard sitting haphazardly a few stations down. Several small globules were sitting on the desktop, shimmering slightly in the light provided by Axl's bot. Neither Daria nor Jane could figure out where the blobs had come from until Burnout reached into a small pile of digipads next to her and handed it to Axl. The hacker used the 'bot's manipulators to crack the pad's shell, then extracted the gelscreen and handed it back to Burnout. The woman then made a precise slit in the middle of the screen with a multitool and squeezed the gel out into a bowl.

With gloved hands, she reached into the bowl and scooped up enough goop to cover two of her fingers. She then picked up a small electronic device from the other side of the desk and carefully pressed it into the gel until there was a reaction. The gel seemed to come alive, forming around the device and encapsulating it in a glitter-encrusted sphere. Burnout set the new globule down with the rest and started to repeat the process.

Jane cleared her throat, causing Burnout to look up at her through heavy duty goggles. "What?" Burnout asked simply.

"We're about to engage in a suicide mission to free some people who may or may not want to kill us themselves or just feed us to the zombie-ghoul-things," Jane told her. "Wanna come?"

Burnout's brow creased behind the goggles. "With you?" she asked.

"Yes, I know, we're not each other's favorite person," Jane said, exasperated. "But I kinda figured since you did such a good job helping us get this far, we might be able to use your help on this, too."

Burnout turned to look at Daria, who simply shrugged. "If it helps any, it was actually her idea to come ask you," she said. "I didn't even know she was gonna do it. I thought we were here to grab Axl."

"Yah, sure, I'll catch you up-"

Daria nodded her head at Axl, but then signaled for him to be quiet. Burnout looked back at Jane.

"No," she finally said after a moment, then turned back to the desk. "I have work to do here."

Jane threw her hands up in the air and shook her head as she and Daria turned to leave. They stopped abruptly when Burnout continued speaking.

"But if you can wait half an hour, I will be finished," she said. "In the meantime, will you please take these morons with you? They are beginning to distract me, and I am about to start a very delicate part of the procedure."

One of the techs bristled and looked like he was about to start shouting, but the other patted him lightly on the arm and steered him away, giving the rest of them a long-suffering look as they left. The bounty hunters marked a half hour to meet back up with Burnout and Axl, then moved on themselves to see if there was any extra equipment they could squeeze out of the agents.

"So, am I going to have to tell Tom that he's got some competition?" Daria asked Jane with a barely perceptible smile.

"Okay, make your jokes," Jane returned unhappily. "But you realize, of course, all you're doing is teaching me to never try to make an effort to be nice, right?"

"It's about time you learned," Daria said sagely. 


	3. Bad to Worse to Worst

"Mack Daddy? Hey, Mack Daddy! Can you hear me, Mack Daddy? Hellooooooo? Mack Daddy, Mack Daddy, Banana Fanna Bo Baddy, Me Mi Mo Maddy! _Mack Daddy!_"

Finally losing his temper, Mack slammed the bottom of his fist against the transparent plasteel wall of the cell. "_Shut up!_" he yelled at the man on the other side. "I told you to stop calling me that!"

Kevin Thompson's eyes grew wide at the display, and he held his hands up in surrender. "Sorry, bro! Didn't mean to bother you, bro! You okay, bro? Are we cool?"

Mack fumed impotently as he clenched and unclenched his hands. It was bad enough that he had to share a cell with his ball-busting wife, but he figured for what he had been a party to, he deserved it. But there was no way in hell he felt he deserved having Thompson and his brain-dead girlfriend as neighbors. The walking dead shambling around just outside the detention area was just shit icing on the rotting cake that had become his life.

"Yah," he forced himself to say. "Sure. Whatever. What do you want this time, Kevin?"

"Awesome!" All of the shock and worry that had been on Kevin's flexible features washed away as if it had never been there. "Well, I was just thinkin', bro, that you and me . . . we were both football players, right? I mean, don't get me wrong, there's not much comparison between us or anything. Sure, you mighta played _pro_ for a couple of years or whatever, but I was a _quarterback_, dude! Anyway, since we got that football thing and all, I was thinking maybe we could meet up after we get outta here, and maybe you could get me a job or somethin'?"

"Kevin? I want you to listen very carefully to me. Are you listening very carefully, Kevin?"

The man-child nodded vigorously.

"Right now, I am standing in a federal holding cell. You may not have noticed, but so are you. You they may only be holding as part of the evidence against me, but I am going to be in here for a very, very long time. And even when I do get out, I will not be a vice president of Landon Enterprises anymore, nor will I ever be again. In fact, I will most likely never be vice president of anything anywhere ever again. I will be stocking shelves at a grocery store somewhere or flipping burgers and asking people if they want fries with that. And that's even _if_ we manage to get out of here alive at all, since there seems to be an army of the undead running around the building killing everything in their path. Do you understand what I'm saying to you, Kevin?"

"Ummmmmm . . . " Kevin scratched his chin thoughtfully for a moment, then brightened as a thought went careening through the few brain cells he had rattling around in his skull. "Oh! You're saying you can get me a job at a burger place? That'd be _sweet!_"

Shock numbed Mack from his head to his feet. He stared at Kevin in abject horror. His muscles went taut and he felt himself start to vibrate from the sheer frustration coursing through him.

"SHUT UP!" he bellowed, banging the wall with each syllable. "SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP! **SHUT! UP!**"

"Um, maybe you'd better come sit over here, babe," Brittany Taylor whispered. She lightly gripped Kevin by the arm and then dug her nails in.

"Ow, babe! Okay, okay already!" Kevin plopped down onto the bench next to Brittany, completely perplexed as to what he did wrong but unwilling to add her squeaky wrath to Mack's thunderous rage by asking.

Mack turned away from the wall and tugged at his dreadlocks. He turned back when he heard the sound of soft laughter coming from further down the line. "And you shut up, too, old man!" he yelled, pointing his finger for emphasis.

The old man in question just shrugged, shook his head, and pulled his hat down over his eyes. His disdainful smile was still visible in the gloom just underneath the brim. Mack threw his hand up in dismissal and walked over to the other side of his cell.

Jodie was there waiting for him, propped back against their bench with her arms crossed and one eyebrow raised. "And they think _I'm_ the volatile one," she mocked.

"Ugh, don't you start, too," Mack said wearily. "Is it too much to ask that we just sit and wait to get eaten in silence?"

"Sitting next to those two numbskulls? I'd have to say so."

Mack and Jodie turned to the front of their cell in surprise at the monotone voice. Jodie immediately jumped to her feet and stalked over to stare hatefully at the newcomer on the other side of the door.

"Daria Morgendorffer!" she snarled. "I've been wanting to get my claws into you. Thank God the zombies didn't get you so I could!"

The edges of Daria's mouth twitched upward. She turned and paced slowly back and forth in front of the cell as she talked. "Well now," she said, "that hardly seems like a fitting greeting for someone who's come all the way down from the fifth floor just to rescue you."

"We don't _need_ rescuing, bitch!"

"_Yes!_" Mack shouted desperately over her. "Yes we do!"

"It's funny," Daria continued, ignoring them. "All of the other cells are either empty or have chewed up corpses in them. Only the ones down this far have living occupants and power. Why is that?"

"If you let us out, we'll tell you," Jodie promised, her voice laced with venom that belied her words.

"Hey . . . hey, is that the cop lady that caught us?" Kevin called out as he and Brittany jumped up and ran to the exit of their own cell. "Hey! Let us out, cop lady! Come on! We'll tell you stuff, too!"

"I'm going to let you out either way," Daria told the Landons off-handedly. "We've got someone working on it right now. But it would be quite helpful if you answered a few questions while we were waiting. Why do these cells have power while the others do not?"

"Hey, you found 'em!" Jane said as she and a blonde woman came strolling up. "And hey, look who it is!"

Mack and Jodie recognized the other bounty hunter from the pictures DENA had shown them, just as they had Daria, but the third woman was unfamiliar to them. Mack didn't like the look of her in any case, especially not the way she was gripping the makeshift slingshot she was holding as if she were ready to use it at any moment.

He shook his head and turned his attention back to Daria. "When everything went crazy, all the power in this section went down and all of the doors opened on their own," he said. "Most of the other prisoners were trying to get out of the area when the zombies attacked. A few tried to get back in their cells, but they wouldn't lock again, so the monsters got inside and killed them there.

"We figured it was the doctor's doing, so we stayed in here 'cause we thought it might be a trap for us. After a few minutes, the power in these three cells came back on and we were locked away again, so maybe we're in the trap now because we _didn't_ leave."

"We stayed 'cause we're buds with the Landons now!" Kevin shouted happily.

"No you're _not!_" Jodie and Mack yelled back in unison.

"_Three_ cells?" Jane asked as she moved further down the line. "Who's in the thi- oh no. No no no no no."

"Oh YES, my little Miss _Lane_!" Anthony DeMartino said, pressing his grinning skull-like face up against the clear plasteel of his cell. "Yes yes yes yes YES!"

"Huh. So they finally caught you, did they?" Daria asked as she approached DeMartino.

"Ah. Yes. Quite _humorous_, Daria," the trapped bounty hunter returned. "Very humorous _indeed_. But no, I was actually bringing a FELON of my OWN down to federal lockup for _later shipping_. Except it turned out the BUILDING to which I was DIRECTED was in some sort of lockdown, so I was REDIRECTED to DENA instead."

"Redirected by who?" Jane asked skeptically. "I mean, if the building you were trying to get into was shut down, then obviously-"

"Daria, your little SIDEKICK is _talking to me again_ as if I give ONE SINGLE _DAMN_ ABOUT WHAT SHE HAS TO _SAY!_"

Jane's jaw dropped. "Amazing! We're in the middle of a deadly situation, he's stuck in a cell and we're the only ones who can get him out, and he's still picking on me!"

"Hey, you," Daria told DeMartino, "stop picking on my sidekick."

As DeMartino's face split into a wide grin, Jane fixed her partner with a steely glare. "You are _so_ not helping things," she said.

"Okay, seriously, who redirected you?"

"A police officer," he replied. "Officer MANDEZ, I believe, badge number _714_."

Daria's gaze went distant as she scanned text flitting across her glasses. "He's not on the list. Dirty."

"DIRTY?" DeMartino repeated, suddenly concerned. "Dirty _how_, exactly? And how would you KNOW, anyway?"

Mack cleared his throat uncomfortably. "Dirty as in he used to work for me and my wife, and apparently he's still working with the same guy we were working with. The doctor."

"The guy from the _old television show_ over in ENGLAND?"

Everyone stared quizzically at the old man for a few seconds, then they jumped slightly when the doors on the cells unlocked with a series of heavy _ka-thunks!_ The prisoners cheered and immediately rushed out into the hallway, exulting in finally being free. The celebration was short-lived, however, as Jodie suddenly turned and rushed Daria, her fingers outstretched.

"Wait, there's something wrong- _dammit!_" Daria swore as she stepped aside, gripped Jodie at the wrist with her good hand, and twirled her around until she landed flat on her back a few feet away. The ex-VP tried to get up, but the air had been knocked out of her and she found herself staring up at Jane's pistols and Burnout's slingshot.

"I think you'd better listen to the lady, Mrs. Landon," Jane said evenly. "Axl said it would take at least five more minutes to get those doors open without the proper codes. Now if you'll just stand up slowly . . . "

"Axl is here, too?" Mack asked, apparently unable to decide if he were pleased or dismayed at the news. "He's got a head full of the doctor's tech, so surely he'd be able hack through this easy, right?"

Daria eyed Jodie warily as the other woman was helped back up to her feet. "Maybe," she said. "But under the circumstances, I don't think we should take any chances. Let's move back to the control station carefully."

"Excellent idea!" a familiar voice echoed through the corridor. "Except maybe here's a better one . . . why don't we all just stay right where we are, shall we?"

Axl's robot whirred itself their way, arms outstretched and guns slowly rotating, but it was no longer Axl's face on the flexscreen in the head. The pierced countenance of the British tattoo artist and hacker had been replaced by a youngish blonde man with a small set of glasses perched on his aquiline nose. Those features were contorted in malicious mirth as his vicious laughter filled their ears.

Most of the group looked at this new face in confusion or worry, but Daria was struck numb with disbelief.

"Ted?"

"What a gloomy bunch!" Ted said disapprovingly as he rolled the robot to a stop in front of them. "And not a single raised gun to meet yours truly? I'm sorely disappointed! C'mon, get those weapons up! No, seriously, it's okay, I don't mind! Let's get a good old fashioned Mexican showdown going here!"

After a few moments of everyone glancing back and forth, unsure of what to make of the situation, Jane shrugged and leveled her pistols at the 'bot. When it didn't fire back, DeMartino unslung his weapon from his back, stepped to the front of the group, and aimed the domed bristle tip at the machine's torso.

Ted grinned at it gleefully. "Oh, _wow!_" he exclaimed. "The coherent light shotgun! How delightfully primitive! I _love_ it!"

"_Primitive_ it may BE, son, but-"

"Ted, what the hell is going on here?" Daria interrupted angrily. She pulled her pistol from its holster with her right hand and switched it over to her left to join the others in covering the drone. "What kind of game are you playing?"

"I'm sorry, what?" Ted's face scrunched in confusion, then suddenly cleared. "Oh, right! The face thing! Sorry, I was trying to make you more comfortable, but I can see you're a little put out instead, and that may put a damper on the conversation. How's this?"

The image faded for a second, then Ted was replaced by Tom Sloane, Jane and Daria's boss. Though he had all the right features, the vicious grin and wild look in the eyes was the same as Ted's before.

"Is that better?" he asked in a perfect simulation of Tom's voice before morphing into Daria's sister, Quinn. "Or this?" Agent Bealer. "How about this?" Agent Moore. "And this is a classic." Trent. "Or maybe someone closer to both of my favorite girls."

Daria grunted in surprise as Jane had to force herself not to go ahead and pull the triggers. Trent laughed at their reaction, then said, "Maybe you'd like something a little more familiar?" and morphed into Jane's face then Daria's in quick succession before changing to Tommy Sherman's.

"No, here we go, I think this will work just nicely," he said, the dead mercenary's jerk-jock voice stretching oddly with the cadence of the hacker's voice. "After all, _he_ doesn't really need this face anymore."

"Fine, whatever," Daria said through her teeth. "Just who are you?"

"Oh, I thought you'd have guessed by now," the fake Tommy said airily. "I'm the one you people keep referring to as 'the doctor'. So inaccurate really. My various doctorates don't really mean much around here, and I suppose that _legally_ speaking, I haven't been a doctor for quite some time. How about . . . the Engineer, instead? With a capital 'E', if you would, please. Yes, Engineer. I build things, so that should fit quite nicely. What do you think?"

"I think it sounds like some sort of stupid supervillain name," Jodie spat at him.

"Well it should," the Engineer told her good-naturedly. "I _am_ some sort of supervillain, in a way. Not stupid, though. My, no. Definitely not. In fact, I'm quite brilliant if I do say so myself. I brought all of _you_ together here, after all, didn't I?"

"But you haven't killed us," Jane pointed out. "Seems like a real brain woulda been able to handle _that_."

The Engineer looked affronted. "Killed you? As in, just out and out _killed_ you? Goodness, no, what fun would _that_ have been? No, what we're going to do now is continue the scenario I've already set in place. You're all going to be players in my very own real live zombie movie!"

"Okay, hate to burst your bubble, pal, but we cut through two patrols on our way down here like scissors through paper," Jane said. "Send everything you've got. We can handle it."

"Hmm, yes," he mused. "Even without the help of Axl and his favorite little toy, your guns _do_ give you a bit of an advantage. So let's just fix that, shall we?"

The subtle whine of primed laser weapons made its presence known by disappearing, leaving only silence behind. Jane checked the safety on her pistols, tried to reprime them, and then clicked the triggers furiously at the robot to no effect. Daria and DeMartino checked their own weapons to find them shut down as well.

"Awwww, too bad, so sad." The Engineer pretended to wipe a tear away from the gelscreen. "Funny thing about modern technology that most people tend to forget, almost everything with electronic parts has at least some form of basic wireless functionality. And hacking your weapons is so laughably easy for me that I almost feel filthy having done it. But oh, well, I guess I'll just have to suffer and shut down all other neat little gadgets you brought with you as well."

Daria and Jane frantically grabbed for the packs of supplies they had brought with them, opened them up, and started trying to activate one dead machine after another.

"Digipads, gone," said the Engineer. "Autodocs, inoperative. Guess you'll have to just bandage all your zombie bites without any expert computer advice, hmm? And let's see, your commlinks are already dead, but we'll need to do something about those pesky AR lenses you're all wearing."

Jane cried out in surprise as her vision went dark. She angrily tore her sunglasses from her face while Burnout calmly removed the DENA-supplied pair she had been wearing. Daria stared back at the Engineer defiantly through her own circle-rimmed specs.

"Oh, come on, my dear," he sniffed. "It's not like you even need them or anything. You haven't required corrective lenses since you got the surgery done when you were eight. Really? Still going to wear them? Oh, very well, be that way. But we _will_ be doing without the lights."

Power in the entire section went down, plunging the detention area from a dim twilight to perfect darkness. Four beams of light immediately flashed on, projecting from Daria's, Jane's, Burnout's, and DeMartino's lapels.

The Engineer laughed happily at the sight. "Flashlights!" he said. "I love it! You can keep those, they're perfect!"

"Now you listen HERE, you MOUTHY little _junk heap!_" DeMartino yelled as she stepped up and shook his dead shotgun at the glowing countenance on the drone's screen. "I can underSTAND if you have some kind of a _grudge_ against the rest of these people. I'm not too FOND of them _myself_. Hell, I've only spent a few HOURS with the LANDONS and their two _brain-dead FRIENDS_, and I _already_ hate them. A LOT. But WHY in the NAME of _all that's holy_ would you drag ME into this?"

The Engineer leaned forward to put his screen directly in DeMartino's face. "Dude, seriously," he said. "_Laser shotgun_. I'm seriously looking forward to taking it back to my lab after you're dead and fiddling around with it. Seriously.

"Plus, come on, you've got the perfect antagonistic relationship with Jane and Daria!" he continued, backing up to cover everyone with his guns again. "I mean, that's what zombie flicks are all about, right? Small groups of people who hate each other but have to band together to succeed against impossible odds? This is scriptwriting 101 here, people! Get with the program!

"When I saw you show up outside just when my plan was really getting underway . . . well, how was I supposed to ignore a coincidence like that? I mean, what a perfect setup, right? Ri-yi-yi-yi-yi-yi-YITE!"

The Engineer's projected face shifted through several forms all at once, then settled on Tom. "Sorry about that," he said, "My little chess match with Axl seems to be-"

The screen went electric blue as the robot's body froze in place. There was silence for a few moments as the group held their collective breath. Just as Kevin seemed about to open his mouth and spew forth some of his unique wisdom, the screen went live again, displaying Axl's piercing-laden head.

"Gerroutta there!" he yelled at them. "I'm tryin' ta get control uvva system, but gonna be a bugger of a ride! Jus' find an exit and wait there!"

"Axl, what-"

"**DO IT!**" he yelled almost loud enough to bust the speakers, then turned the 'bot's arms in at its torso, spun the lasers, and opened fire, tearing its insides apart. The screen went dark and the burnt husk of the drone toppled over on its side, emitting a thin stream of black smoke.

"You heard the man," Jane said as she started to marshal the others forward. "Let's go!"

As everyone else started making their way out, Jodie and Mack hung back. "Now hold on just a minute!" said Jodie. "How do we know that wasn't just another trick? Maybe getting near an exit is just what the doctor or the Engineer or whatever the hell he is _wants_ us to do!"

"Okay. See ya!" Jane waved quickly at the Landons, then turned to continue on as most of the others followed her. Kevin looked back at them for a second, but snapped around when Brittany grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and pulled him forward.

DeMartino was the only one left after a few seconds. "Look," he said quietly. "I don't really KNOW you two. I have NO IDEA what's even _going on_. But I DO know Morgendorffer and Lane. There have been RUMORS that they've been doing _exactly this kind of thing_ for a WHILE now, and I for one am WILLING to give them _the benefit of the doubt_."

As the old man turned to go, Mack called out, "But I thought you didn't even like them!"

"Son, I don't like ANYBODY," the bounty hunter answered without looking back. "It doesn't mean they aren't _good people_."

After a few moment, the Landons were matching strides with him. Jodie scowled when she saw him looking over and smiling serenely.

"Oh, _please_," she sneered. "You were taking the last of the light with you."

* * *

"No no no no no no no no no!"

Artie paced back and forth. He clawed at the sides of his head, fingernails scraping against the cloth of his cap before leaving red trails on the skin of his cheeks and moving back up to start again. His eyes never stopped moving, flitting here and there in a desperate attempt to see something that wasn't there yet.

Every once in a while he would glance nervously over at Axl, but the hacker was deep in his own mental world, a place where Artie couldn't go. Trying to access the mental link to the computer even through the most basic electrode crown gave him incredible headaches. The doctors at DENA had said something about how his brain was wired up differently from other people's, so that reaction was normal amongst psychics, but then they started going into all the technical details and Artie's eyes had started to glaze over. He didn't remember a whole lot of the conversation after that.

A phantom sound caused Artie to whirl around on the spot. His pudgy yet gangly physique caused his arms and legs to keep spinning while the rest of his body tried to stop, resulting in him almost throwing himself to the ground. He desperately searched the dim room around him, but saw nothing, sensed nothing.

Agents Bealer and Moore entered the room and called his name, making him jump in surprise. As soon as he saw who it was, he ran toward them, grabbed Agent Moore by the suit jacket, and started jumping up and down.

"He's coming! _He's coming!_" he screeched at them. "I don't know where, I don't know how, but he's gonna be here and everything's gonna go wrong, oh so wrong!"

Moore grasped the young man by the shoulders and attempted to settle him down. "Artie, take a second to breathe," he said. "Remember the training. Connect to my mind. Feel the calm I feel. Bring that calm into yourself. Okay?"

Artie began to take deep, cleansing breaths and reached out with his mind to brush against Moore's. Thanks to the dampening circuits in his hat, he was able to just touch instead of hitting the other man's brain like a freight train. Moore was indeed calm, at that same exact level that all DENA agents seemed to possess, covering their emotions like the flat surface of a placid lake.

Swallowing hard enough to make his over-sized Adam's apple bobble even more than usual, Artie looked up at the agents more lucidly and said, "The doctor is coming. He's been in the building already, he brought the disease, injected it personally, then erased the videos and the memories of it happening. And he's still here, his presence crawling in the walls. But now he's really on his way, a force as big as a building. A force as big as _this_ building."

Axl screamed, startling the agents before they could fully assimilate what Artie had said. The hacker reached up and snatched the plugs from his head and threw them to the sides before rolling his wheelchair back half a meter and grabbing his temples.

"SON OVVA BITCH SHIT CUNT!" he yelled out, his voice twisted in pain. "AH! AAAAAGH!"

"Mr. Morrison," Agent Bealer called out as they gathered around him. "Are you-"

With a cry of outrage, Axl shoved them away and rolled back up to his workstation. "The bitch cut me out ovva system wif a chisel anna sledge'ammah!" he snarled, sounding almost as offended as angry. Quick fingers worked across the flexboard and mouse, pulling up window after window on the computer screen, rapid firing a series of quick instructions across the network. After a few moments, he turned to Agent Bealer.

"I need root access, luv," he said. "_Immediately._"

"We are not authorized to-"

"_Don't give me that bloody bullshit!_"

She stared at him impassively for several seconds, then reached down to turn the flexboard her way and started typing. Axl chewed distractedly on his thumbnail as she pulled up the access lists and began to modify them and Axl's own profile.

"Hello, everyone," a soft voice said behind them. Agent Moore and Artie turned to see Ted standing there, looking around in faint interest. "I was just doing a few more scans of the nano-virus when my workstation shut down. Would any of you have a clue why that would-"

He stopped short when Artie suddenly jumped up into his face and started peering intently at his eyes. The psychic moved his hands around, almost but not quite touching Ted's arms and chest, then began to make small sniffing noises, like a bloodhound on a trail.

"Oh, hello, Arthur," Ted said, only slightly perturbed by the strange behavior. "I'm afraid I don't have any gum right on hand today, but I could go see if there's any in my office if you would like."

Artie stopped, appearing to be as frozen as a statue, then stepped back and quietly said, "The Engineer . . . "

Axl's head whipped around. "The Engineer?" he repeated. "The . . . that was her name . . . _his_ name! The doctor was a bloke! How could I 'ave forgotten . . . ?"

"Because he erased most of your memories of him through select nanobot injections," Agent Bealer reminded him as she straightened up. "Access granted, Mr. Morrison. You now have root control. Please keep us informed if there are any more changes or if you remember any more about our enemy."

As Axl thanked her and then rapidly shoved the leads back into his head sockets, Moore carefully watched Artie as Artie stared intently at Ted and Ted looked around, bewildered.

"I'm sorry, I think I may have stepped into the middle of something," the doctor said. "Who is the Engineer?"

"_You_ are!" Artie exclaimed, then punched the side of his own head. "No, the doctor is the Engineer, and the Engineer is you, but only for now! He'll be someone else soon. And then someone else. And someone else. The man of a thousand faces!"

The two agents frowned at each other. "Artie," Bealer said slowly, "you are beginning to babble again. Remember your training."

The psychic groaned and shook his hands in frustration. "That's when he said he was pretending! Pretending to be this man! What is the Engineer? A miserable pile of people! He wants to take your face . . . " He moved his hand over his face in a circle, then pulled it away and finished, " . . . _off!_"

"Disguise!" Ted exclaimed brightly. "He's saying this Engineer fellow is disguising himself somehow! I think."

"He's a boss man now," Artie said distantly. "Reporter lady. You," he said, pointing at Agent Bealer, then Agent Moore. "You. Boyfriend brother. Good girls . . . _the hunter!_"

"Sherman?" Moore asked, eyebrow quirked. "What reason would there be for pretending to be a dead man?"

Axl's screen lit up, showing his digital face. "Oi! You lot!," he called out. "I've almost got my 'bot back from this wanker, but there's something queer going on wif tha rest of tha system! Give a look, see what's what!"

Axl disappeared back into the system as Moore and Bealer moved to the workstations on either side of his body. After waiting a moment for the computers to activate, they activated system scans for unusual activity. While they worked, Artie continued looking at Ted oddly, with an expression as if he'd misplaced something and was trying to retrace his steps to find it.

Ted, meanwhile, watched the others work, his pleasant features betraying no signs of worry whatsoever. He looked over the programs running and the directories being searched through and seemed to find the entire process more fascinating than anything else, even though he knew quite well that everyone's lives could hang in the balance.

A gasp of surprise came from Agent Bealer and Artie at the exact same time. "He was right," she said, "the system-"

Before she could finish, the workstations she and Moore were working at shut down. The lights on Axl's computer seemed to flicker for a second, but stayed strong. The agents tapped furiously on their flexboards, but to no effect.

"Guns," Artie said nervously. "Computers. Communications." He looked at Agent Moore. "Augmented Reality lenses."

Moore blinked rapidly as everything in his line of vision went dark. He removed his shades and looked over to see Bealer doing the same. They pulled out their pistols and tried to prime them, but no matter how many times they pulled the switch back, there was no familiar whine of energy collecting.

Artie looked up at the ceiling. "Lights."

Everything except Axl's computer shut down, plunging the room into almost total darkness. The agents activated their lapel lights.

"This Engineer certainly is a thorough sort of fellow," Ted said as he shined a small penlight around.

Ignoring his comment, Agent Bealer worked on pulling a status report out of the one working machine. Before she could finish, a window popped up on the screen, demanding her attention.

"Mr. Morrison says that there is a war going on inside the system," she said flatly. "And right now, we're losing. He is trying to free Miss Morgendorffer and the others from the Engineer, but we all need to gather everyone together and prepare to evacuate the building. He is attempting to open an exit for us."

"Evacuate? I'm not certain that's the best idea," Ted told her. "With as few people as there are in this structure, relatively speaking, the nano-virus is more or less contained, and we can wait out its cycle in due time. If it is allowed to enter the rest of the city, we may be looking at an epidemic."

"If we don't leave, we may all die," said Moore.

"If we do leave, everyone in Lawndale City may die," Ted countered. "I don't know if we'll be able to stop this from spreading in time, especially with communications to the outside disabled. There may already be an army of police, firemen, federal agents, or anything else outside to help us, or there may be no one."

Three agents appeared at the door to the room and called out to them. "Gather everyone together. Meeting in five," Agent Moore told them, then turned back to Ted. "We have precious little time to debate this issue, Dr. DeWitt-Clinton. Our automated sentries are almost certainly offline, which means the altered humanoids will be upon us any moment."

"What about Axl?" Artie asked. "Artie likes Axl!"

"He has given instructions to leave him behind," said Agent Bealer. She looked at the screen, then added, "And it would appear he is becoming more insistent that we depart. Doctor?"

"It would seem we have little choice," Ted said with a shrug. "Once again, the Engineer makes fools of us all."

* * *

"Okay, no weapons, no nightvision, and almost no gear," Jane said as they walked through the corridors, checking every nook and cranny in case of surprise attack as they passed. "What's the plan?"

"The closest exit is the way we came in, the front doors," Daria replied, "so we go straight there. The Engineer will be expecting that, of course, so there will probably be a trap laid out for us. We'll just have to be smarter than the trap. And as luck would have it, we actually _do_ have a few weapons at our disposal."

Pulling back the sleeve on her left arm, Daria carefully worked her blade harness off and handed it to Jane. "The automatic deploy doesn't work now, but the manual release should. We'll lose most of the use of the hands they're over," she said, hitting the release on her remaining blade, "but in my case I can't do much with my right at the moment anyway. Burnout?"

The blonde jogged forward as Jane adjusted the straps of the blade harness onto her thinner arm.

"Will that slingshot of yours actually do anything?" Daria asked.

"Probably," Burnout returned. "Won't know until I try it out."

"Okay, take point. Jane, drop to the back and watch our rear. I'll catch everyone else up to speed."

After nodding their understanding, the three women took their positions. Daria was heartened to see that the Landons had decided to join them after all. Despite Jodie's continued animosity toward her, she still didn't want to see them or any of the others dead. She quickly laid out a short version of all the events that had led up to their current predicament, causing DeMartino to look like the smuggest canary-eating cat in the world.

"I KNEW those rumors were true!" he crowed. "And you were HOLDING OUT on me _this entire time!_ For SHAME, Miss Morgendorffer! For SHAME!"

"Yes, yes," Daria said with sarcastic long-suffering, "I'm extremely sorry we didn't let you know we were _secret_ agents. I'm a horrible person."

Burnout called back to the group that she had reached the door to the stairs. They all stood around as she opened it, tensed and ready for an attack, but the only thing on the other side was the pitch black stairwell. They moved in slowly, checking either side of the door and then up and down the shaft. Confident that nothing was going to jump out at them unexpectedly, they began their decent to the level below them.

They were halfway down when Burnout called for a stop and pointed. Daria and Jane leaned over the rail and peered down to see a red light emanating from the floor. They moved their lapel lights over it to reveal the utility access hatch they had noticed earlier. As they watched, the light turned green and the door slid to the side with a heavy _klank!_

The stench of rotten meat was the first thing to hit them. The second was the sight of a writhing mass of arms and heads as a pack of zombies pushed up through the hole to land sprawled across the floor. As the first batch got to their feet, even more were coming out after them, pouring out like toothpaste getting squeezed from a tube. The humans stared down in horror.

"We're screwed, aren't we?" Daria asked.

Jane nodded. "Oh so _very_ screwed," she verified.

Daria started slapping shoulders and yelled, "New plan! New plan! Go up! _Up!_ Fast as you can! Jane, you're on point! Burnout, time to earn your keep!"

As the group started scrambling up the stairs, pushed along by Daria in the back, Burnout followed them more slowly, walking backwards with her slingshot up and ready. One of the glittery balls of gelscreen sat in the pocket, which she held with only just enough pressure to keep it between her fingers.

Most of the ghouls seemed to be of the slow type, but a few fast movers deftly took the steps two at a time. When the first turned the nearest corner, Burnout let her projectile fly. It zipped through the air and hit the monster in the shoulder, breaking its hard outer shell in the process. The gel on the inside was still sticky, gluing itself to the creature's clothing. The small battery in the middle, jolted by the impact, dispersed its entire payload into the gel, causing its surface to explode into inch long spikes all around with enough force to embed a few of them into the ghoul's skin.

The energy coursed through those spikes and into the ghoul's body, causing him to shudder for a second then drop backward down the stairs and into his brethren. Pulling two more of the stun balls in succession from her hard-lined hip pouch, Burnout downed another two ghouls, further slowing the horde down. Figuring she'd done enough damage, she turned around and ran up the stairs to catch back up to the group.

Daria looked back to see Burnout giving her a thumbs up. She nodded once and started pushing the others even faster, the risk of letting the monsters catch up outweighing the risk of a twisted ankle.

"Not to question your plan, Daria," Jane yelled over her shoulder, "but just where the hell am I going?"

"Fifth floor!" Daria yelled back. "Here!"

The doorway was still open from their last trip through the area, and they stepped out into the blood-stained corridor. Once everyone was through, DeMartino and Mack grabbed the edge of the door and pulled then pushed it shut.

"Is that gonna stop 'em?" Kevin asked as they all stopped to catch their breaths.

"It should," reasoned Daria. "These things aren't very intelligent. Seems they just go where the meat is."

Brittany looked at the door uncertainly. "What about the Engy guy? He opened that other door, right?"

Jane shook her head. "The other door had power. This one doesn't. As long as it stays that way, we're good. Just everyone rest, then we get back to the safe area."

"_Shit!_"

DeMartino, who had been looking around through the small window in the stairwell door, jumped back, causing everyone else to jump in surprise. His light illuminated the half of a ghoul's face that could be seen through the window. It looked back and forth at them, baring its teeth. A hollow thumping came from its side of the door as it beat ineffectually on the plasteel.

"It can't get through," Jodie said over and over, trying to convince herself as much as anyone else. "It can't get through. It can't get through."

The thumping stopped as the monster glanced to the side. It moved slightly, then there were two light taps followed by the door jerkily moving over an inch.

"Aw, no way!" Kevin exclaimed. "He's cheating!"

The door moved again. Slowly but surely, the ghoul was pulling it open, and through the tiny sliver of space between it and the frame, they could hear the reverberating footsteps of more ghouls coming up the steps. The bounty hunters and Burnout quickly started herding the others down the hallway.

"I thought you said it couldn't get through!" Jodie screeched.

"Apparently I'm a big fat liar!" Daria yelled back.

Burnout took the tail again as Daria took the front and led the group around to Moore and Bealer's office, then followed her memory of Axl's lead to get to the other emergency stairwell. The bodies they had left in their wake before still sat on the ground, unmoving, which gave them some small comfort. The creatures, for whatever other advantages they had, were still vulnerable and could be killed.

Daria and Jodie started pulling open the door to the stairs just a moment too late for the bounty hunter to remember it should have still been open from the last time. Four ghouls reached out, pushed the door all the way open, then poured out into the hallway.

Daria sliced at the creature that ambled her way, cutting into its frontal lobe and sending it to the floor. Jodie was not so lucky as the other three latched onto her and dragged her back toward the stairs. She managed to grab onto the frame of the door, but there was a sickening crunching sound and she began to let out a stream of curses.

Mack leaped forward, grabbing onto Jodie's forearm and pulling. She released the frame and gripped the sleeve of his prison jumpsuit, tearing it before she let go again and got a better hold on his wrist.

"I've got you, honey!" he bellowed. "Just hold on! _Somebody fucking help me!_"

DeMartino and Kevin jumped in as Jane slipped past and started hacking at the ghouls with her blade. Burnout tried to push through and get a good aim with her slingshot, but the three men blocked her path.

"_Fuck you, Daria!_" Jodie managed in between full-throated screams. "_Fuck you, Jane! **And fuck you, Mack!**_"

Mack, DeMartino, and Kevin stumbled back as Jodie's arm left its socket, the skin, muscles, and other tissues tearing away in a ragged, bloody mess. She gave one last horrified shriek of pain then fell silent. Jane made a final swipe at one of the ghouls that had tried switching its attack to her, then jumped back into the corridor as the monsters retreated down the stairs with their grisly prize.

"What the hell are you doing?" Jane demanded as Daria swept past her and started after the ghouls.

"Keep everyone up here!" was the only answer she received.

Burnout moved to follow her, but Jane put her hand out and shook her head. The blonde frowned, but stayed at the doorway, slingshot at the ready. Jane turned to the rest of the group and noticed a high keening noise. It took her a few seconds to trace the sound to Brittany, who was staring down at Mack and screaming as quietly as she could.

DeMartino and Kevin had picked themselves up off the ground, but Mack sat against the wall, cradling his dead wife's arm. His eyes were wide, his dark skin had gone ashen, and his breathing had turned ragged. Even at a distance and in the poor lighting, Jane could see the perspiration standing out on his forehead. She kneeled down next to him, making sure her blade arm was as far back as she could get it.

"Mack?" she said quietly. "Is it okay if I call you 'Mack'?"

He didn't seem to hear her. "They got her," he whispered, to Jane or to himself she couldn't be sure. "They got her. We . . . we never really got along. We started off good, y'know, but then things went south, but we stayed together because it made good sense. Good business sense. She was always about good business sense. But I . . . I don't know. I don't know if I still felt anything for her. I shoulda. I wanted to. And now . . . "

A few words were lost on Jane with the noise Brittany was still making, so she motioned Kevin to tend to her before turning back to Mack.

"I know this is going to sound harsh," she said, "but she's dead and you're still alive. And we need everyone who's alive if we're going to get out of this. Are you with us?"

He wiped his eyes and looked down at the arm in his lap. Blood had poured from the stump and stained the entire left leg of his jumpsuit red. With exaggerated slowness, he picked the detached limb up and set in on the ground, then stood up and nodded. He looked jittery and seemed to have difficulty focusing his eyes on any one spot for more than a few seconds, but he also appeared more aware of his immediate surroundings than before.

"Good man," Jane said, patting him on the shoulder.

* * *

Down in the stairwell, Daria watched the monsters feast.

In her mind, they had definitely made the full switchover to "ghouls". The Engineer's nanobots might have been coursing through their bloodstream and attaching themselves to the muscles and nervous tissue, forcing the beasts into their horrific behavior, but their actions definitely painted them in a ghoulish light.

As she watched, one of the ghouls gnawed a bit off of limp corpse the three held between them. It chewed the flesh thoroughly before tilting its head back and swallowing. Moments later, as it went in for another bite, a series of gashes across the side of its face began to stitch themselves back together to make the skin whole.

_Son of a bitch,_ Daria thought in disgust. She observed the ritual for a few seconds more, then turned and ran back up the steps. She figured there was no point in trying to disguise her presence from the ghouls. They were far too busy with their meal to take any notice of her.

She emerged from the stairs to find the survivors looking back at her wearily. Mack especially appeared to be about to topple over, but he was on his feet, and she figured that had to count for something.

"They're regenerating," she said simply, causing the group to gasp and swear in response.

Jane spat on the ground. "How fast?" she asked.

"Tommy Sherman fast," Daria told her. "They aren't attacking us to infect us. That's just a handy little bonus. They're trying to eat us so they can use the material to heal themselves. Pretty damn ingenious, really. But that's why the ghouls in the office didn't have any wounds on them. They'd just finished dinner."

"Shouldn't we be, like, getting the hell out of here?" Brittany asked.

"Yes," Daria agreed. She looked back at the doorway. "But not this way. There may be more traps for us. We'll find another staircase, then we'll go down to the fourth floor to find an exit to a landing area. We'll just have to hope the others make it out on their own."

As they set out, Burnout took point and Jane took rear guard again. Brittany and Kevin helped Mack along as DeMartino matched pace with Daria.

"Ah, if I MAY, Miss Morgendorffer," he said. "I was just THINKING, perhaps the stairs _aren't the best idea_. We've been ATTACKED at TWO of them, and the EngiNEER will most like assume we will try them _again_. Perhaps _another approach_ may be PRUDENT?"

Daria narrowed her eyes at the man. In all the years they had been unofficial rivals in the bounty hunter biz, she had never heard him talk so formally or politely unless he was lulling someone into a false sense of security before bawling them out over some perceived slight.

"Perhaps," she said slowly. "What do you have in mind?"

"The ELEVATOR shafts," he explained. "Even IF the bastards can _get in there_ and CLIMB, Miss Burnout should be able to pick them off _quite easily_ from the doors. Then, when the way is CLEAR, we climb DOWN, open the DOORS, and _mission accomplished!_"

"Hmm." Daria rubbed her chin thoughtfully. "It sounds suspiciously like a good idea. But we'll try it anyway. _Carefully_."

She passed the word on to the others, and within just a few moments, Burnout had scouted out a nearby set of lifts. Together, DeMartino and Kevin managed to pull the doors open while Burnout covered them. It took some effort, but finally they were rewarded by an empty shaft.

As DeMartino held the back of her jacket to steady her, Burnout leaned out and shined her light up and then down. The cables hung down as far as she could see, but there was no sign of the elevator itself or any ghouls. The bounty hunter reeled her back in on her signal, then Jane slipped by and slithered down onto the rungs built into the wall below the opening.

"HEY!" DeMartino shouted.

"Ladies first!" Jane yelled back up with a smile and a wink. "Besides, I've got a crunchy outer shell and a knife to wedge the door open. So wait your turn, old man!"

He swore angrily, but refrained from slinging one of his usual insults. Daria leaned out and filled the space with one of her own smart remarks instead.

"If you get yourself killed, Lane, you're out of my will!"

Jane laughed darkly and swung her legs out into the space in front of the fourth floor door. Though her upper body strength wasn't on par with her partner's, she easily lowered herself the rest of the way and then hung onto the bottom rung with one hand while she slid her arm blade between the double doors. After a few moments of wiggling it around and changing the angle of attack, she managed to open the door just a crack.

The flailing arms that exploded from that crack nearly caused her to lose her grip. With a cry of surprise, she grabbed back onto the inset ladder with both hands and started hauling herself up, but the ghouls below quickly got the door all the way open and flung their arms around her legs.

"_Gahdammit!_"

"_Jane!_" Daria yelled, her words echoing in the shaft. "Are you okay?"

"Yes, fine and dandy!" the raven-haired hunter shouted back sarcastically. "Minor undeath issue! Be with you in a moment!"

"How's your armor holding up?"

Jane heaved herself up and wrapped one of her arms around a rung, then grabbed onto her wrist with her other hand, careful not to cut herself with the arm blade above it. Her muscles were already straining to their breaking point, but wedging herself into the tight space afforded her a moment to wipe away the sweat dripping into her eyes and take stock of the situation.

She couldn't tell exactly how many ghouls were down below, but she could still see and feel them scrabbling at her legs, trying to tear into them with their fingernails but failing miserably. One even managed to sink its teeth into Jane's knee, but all she felt was a slight pressure.

"Not . . . too bad!" she wheezed. "I think . . . they just- _shit!_"

"What? _What?_"

"They're tearing at my boots! And I kinda forgot my armor only goes down to my ankles!"

DeMartino, who had already swung himself out into the shaft, quickened his decent. Burnout leaned over, slingshot out, but once again she found her view blocked. Daria slammed her hand into the wall next to her in frustration, gritting her teeth and feeling completely useless.

With a speed and agility that belied his age, DeMartino swung out around Jane as he came down, latching the toes of his cowboy boots into the smaller, shallower trough of rungs encircling the door frame. With a heavy grunt of exertion, he managed to kick-step his way across the top of the frame and over to the side, then continued down diagonally, reaching around Jane to do so.

"My APOLOGIES, Miss Lane," he said after accidentally jabbing her in the side on his way past.

"Hey, no worries," Jane replied, her voice straining and face turning red as she struggled not to be dragged under. "Get these things offa me . . . and we'll call it even!"

Fully transferred to the side ladder, he grinned toothily and pulled out his shotgun to hold it by the barrel. "I THINK I can arrange THAT!" he snarled, then got the nearest ghoul's attention by slamming the butt of the gun into its face.

It jerked back as blood exploded from its nose, but it retained its hold on Jane's legs, causing her to cry out as she was jerked around. DeMartino followed up his first attack with a second blow expertly delivered to the exact same spot, shooting more blood into the air and collapsing the ghoul's nose into its head. A third shot took it down permanently, shoving the bones of its nose back into its brain.

Two of the monsters lost interest in the unmovable woman and turned to grab at him instead. He beat one back, but the other snatched hold of his weapon and yanked on it. His grip slipped a little, but rather than allow his ghoul-beater to be taken, DeMartino swung around and planted his boot in the ghoul's midsection. It flew backward as he followed it in and jabbed an elbow backward into the one creature still hanging onto Jane's legs.

The ghoul, unprepared for this attack, stumbled out into the elevator shaft and swung for a second. When it reached the apex of its swing, its grasp failed and it slid off to tumble silently down the shaft, hitting the cables with a tight _spang_ every so often on the way.

Jane swung back and hit the wall with the lower part of her torso, knocking the air out of her. Her grip on the arm which was twisted around the rung slipped and she fell as well. For one sickening moment, she thought she was going to join the ghoul, but because her legs and hips had swung out to the other side of the doorway, she hit the floor with the edge of the door frame slamming into the small of her back.

She stretched to reach behind herself and grabbed the top rung of the ladder below so that when she started to slide backward, she merely flipped over and landed with her feet safely on a lower rung. With the last of her strength, she pulled herself onto the fourth floor and collapsed. Looking up, she blearily made out DeMartino swinging his shotgun wildly, shooing the remaining ghouls back, putting them at a stalemate.

Up above, Daria watched the entire show with mounting horror. Every fiber of her being wanted to leap down into the shaft and do something, but she flexed her injured hand and reminded herself that she'd never make it in time, and even if she did there was little she or any of the others could do under the circumstances. When the two other bounty hunters finally disappeared through the opening below, clearing the way, she turned to Burnout, her eyes lit with fire.

"_Help them,_" she commanded.

Without batting an eye, Burnout wedged her slingshot into her belt, put her bullet back in her hip pack, and then hopped out into space. She twisted her body as she moved through the air, fell nearly halfway to the floor below, then reached out and snagged onto the ladder just as easily as if she'd been walking across flat ground. Within moments she, too, had disappeared through the lower opening.

Daria watched after her, straining her ears to listen to the sounds of pitched battle coming up from below, then jerked backward to avoid being cut in half by the suddenly closing doors. She looked back to see Kevin, Brittany, and Mack staring at her in shock, then turned back to the door to see that the panel next to it was lit up. Instead of the usual controls, the screen showed only four words in big block letters.

**HA**

HA

HA

-E 


End file.
